Sarah Simmons is a chef, and CEO and founder of CITY GRIT Hospitality Group, which operates restaurants and a non-profit in Columbia, SC. Unlike most restauranteurs, her goals extend beyond busy brunches and James Beard Awards (those she’s got one of those). Through its non-profit arm Feed the City, the company works to end poverty and increase local food access, and runs a successful workforce development program centered on the hospitality industry. That program serves non-college bound youth from the most underserved and poorest communities in the city.
Simmons is also a Liberty Fellow, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She took time from the dual responsibilities of running three restaurants and a non-profit—each of those more than a full-time job—to talk about her city, her business, and her approach to making Columbia a better city.
Q: What’s unique about your approach?
A: People think of us as a restaurant group, which is our business, but we are more precisely a leadership development company that uses restaurants and hospitality to monetize our programming.
The program begins with workforce development training at the most basic level, supported by legal counseling, financial advisement, and social work services. It then provides participants with opportunities to learn the skills required to enter the workforce in any industry and eventually grow into leaders.
At the end of the day, we are fighting to change the systems that breed inequity and keep minorities impoverished and hungry. This battle, which requires dismantling decades of policies and programs designed to support inequity, will take years to win. We can, however, celebrate many smaller, individual victories along the way through Feed the City’s programs.
Feed the City has some big differentiators as far as non-profits go. We focus on total wellness for an age group that’s often underserved, and who make up the largest percentage of people living in poverty in our city. We put food equity, financial stability, confidence building, and soft skills development at the center of every program. Our program puts as much emphasis on financial, nutritional, and personal wellbeing as we do on professional development. After participation in our program, young adults are set up for an entry level “leadership” role in almost any industry.
Q: Why is this work urgent?
A: We have a 24 percent poverty rate in Columbia, and it’s highest among 18- to 24-year-old men and women and 25 to 34-year-old women. One-fourth of the population suffers from hunger, and there are twice as many African Americans in poverty than whites.
A large portion of these impoverished youth live are concentrated in a zip code with no industry and very limited public transportation. This area has the most concentrated poverty rate in the city, with very few businesses and only one major grocery store within the 63.3 square mile zip code. There are few-to-no options for non-college bound youth in these communities. Even those who’ve graduated from high school struggle to find employment due to lack of skills, training, and transportation. The challenges of generational poverty and racial discrimination they experience when trying to find employment outside of their communities also furthers these struggles.
Working with these young adults over the past three years has shown us that poverty is much more than a financial circumstance. Escaping the poverty cycle requires not only financial stability, but emotional and physical wellness and strong support systems and relationships. Ending poverty at its most basic level starts with creating opportunity. Without opportunities to learn and earn, there is no escaping the cycle of poverty.
Q: What results have you seen so far?
A: Since its founding in 2021, Feed the City has reached over 100 vulnerable youth through its partnership with City Grit. Though the Leadership Development program, nine young adults have been guided through substance abuse recovery and are healthy and financially stable. Twenty-two young adults have been able to purchase their first car or a new car with a low-interest loan, and 11 have saved enough to purchase their own home. Seventy-one of those young adults are earning over $45,000 per year, and 42 have three months of expenses in a savings account.
Q: What does your typical work week look like?
A: You do not want to know the true answer. Operating these businesses with an ethical lens has been extremely draining on us financially, as we started from zero and then had to survive Covid. My husband and I have worked 80-plus hour weeks for the past seven years.
Most businesses work because the founders/owners make profits off of the sweat equity of lower-paid employees. In our business, that script has flipped, and we have made the sacrifice in order to build a stable, sustainable foundation built on equitable principles. As we reach the tipping point, we’re just about to be able to be paid regularly and work about 50-60 hours a week—which feels like a vacation. But next year, I am taking a huge step back from the business to focus on some initiatives which impact the poverty cycle from various other touchpoints, so that cycle may start again.
Q: How have you leveraged entrepreneurial or business skills from your time in the corporate world?
(Photo credit: Liberty Fellowship)
A: Before I started cooking professionally, I had 15 years in the corporate world. Most of that time was spent as a management consultant, specifically in the retail space. And my specialty was helping clients make more money or lose less money, or be more efficient. And a lot of that comes from being strategic writing, really solid plans, following those plans, editing them when they’re not going the way that you think they should go or want them to go, and putting infrastructure in place, and processes. And so honestly, that has served me so well in this new stage of my life. I know that for a fact that after opening my first restaurant, which I had no idea what I was doing, the only reason why I was successful was because of the systems that I put in place, which I would never have known had I not had that career previously.
I think the luxury that we have—I call it a luxury; I think some of our employees would call it a hassle—is a lot of structure and processes in our business. And what’s amazing about that is that it helps us make sure that we can keep the lights on and pay the bills, and do the things that we’ve set out to do.
By breaking down why those processes are important, it gives everyone some insight into looking under the hood on how the business works. We explain, well, why do we capture this data, or how do we use this information, or why this is important? And that just makes everyone better at looking at a situation and making a better decision. Decision making is learned, and it’s something that you learn over time.
If you’ve never had the agency to make your own decisions and fail and learn from those failures, then it’s going to be really hard to grow. And so we try to build a safe space with a lot of structure, but with enough leniency for them to learn.
Q: What do you think the keys are to a strong strategy when it comes to driving social impact?
A: Driving a strong social impact really begins with listening. I know that I like to be the smartest person in the room; it is one of my fatal flaws. I’ve been able to use that because I firmly believe you can’t be the smartest person in the room unless you’ve heard all of the sides or done as much digging and research as you can, which has helped me listen. And I think that especially when you are trying to impact a community you’re not from…then you have to utilize your ears more than your mouth and let what you hear go into your heart, and make sure what’s in your heart isn’t what you want as much as it is what they want or need.
And that’s something that I have learned over time because I had this idealistic vision of how everything was going to come to life, and then realized that it wasn’t about my vision. And now every six months, we reevaluate where we’re going and what we’re learning and what we’re doing. So this vision that I have is becoming our vision, and that is freedom for me because it means that this will continue even if I want to or need to move on to something else.
Q: What’s one thing you wish you’d known before starting this work?
A: I wish I’d known I really need a master’s degree in social work, or the funding to hire a social worker before taking this problem on with little-to no-idea as to how to do it.
Q: You’re a Liberty Fellow and member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN); how has your Fellowship experience and engagement with the AGLN impacted your approach to your work?
A: Being a Liberty Fellow and connected to other fellows within the AGLN has been a lifeline I didn’t know I needed. Connecting with so many fellows working to solve the same or similar issues has made me feel less lonely and often helped to give me a boost of energy when I needed it most.
The work we’re doing has such a finite impact at our current point in this journey. While we know it will have the potential to compound, it will be years before we can see the impact on the critical mass in our own community.
I think people—especially very highly driven people—tend to be discouraged when their impact seems minute compared to the larger problem as a whole. But through the AGLN, I’ve had the opportunity to share successes and setbacks with other fellows working on solving similar issues in their communities and industries which, in some cases, has helped them accelerate their impact.
Likewise, I’ve been able to learn from others who have shared tools, research, success stories, connections to funding, opportunities for brainstorming, and other things which have helped strengthen my program, enhanced my work, saved me time, improved my strategies, and even connected me to someone who may be able to help us secure funding which allows us to accelerate our programs.
Being a part of the AGLN has truly made me feel as if we’re all moving the larger needle together versus slowly moving thousands of needles alone in a silo. It has given me the confidence to tackle an even larger issue—developing a strategy to attempt to change how credit scores are determined—which is a potential gamechanger for every one of us in America who are working on pulling young adults out of the generational poverty cycle.
