St Giles Hotel Group's "Hotels with Heart": Housing & Healing through Hospitality - Abigail Tan

Josiah: Today, we're hearing the story behind Hotels with Heart, an initiative that we've talked about before on the show, and it's one that I've wanted to revisit for a long time. And in this episode, our career correspondent and hertelier founder, Emily Goldfisher, sat down with Abigail Tan, CEO of St. Giles Hotel Group, to share how this idea took shape from housing those in need during the pandemic to creating pathways to employment and independence through the Hotels with Heart Academy. Let's get into it. 

[intro]

Abigail: Tell me about this charity that you've started called Hotels with Heart.

Emily: Yeah, so Hotels of Heart is I think my biggest passion right now. It started as just an idea where, you know, I was in this CEO role and thinking the hotel makes money, but then I'm looking around me and I see so much poverty and homelessness. drug use, especially here in the centre of London. And I was thinking, you know, we occupy this whole island site. How can we be more than just a hotel and a business? How can we be like a soul, a face, something that makes money, yes, but also helps the community because, you know what I said, hospitality is an amazing career. In a hotel, we have so many resources to offer, so many ways we can teach people from human resources to engineering. You want to learn plumbing, you can do it here. You want to learn finance, you can do it here. So I was like, why can't we use the resources that we have and our people to help train and to impact? So in one way, you're helping society, but also giving our own hotel team more purpose.

Abigail: And so how does it work in practice? So you have employees that volunteer to help train people or what does it look like?

Emily: Right now, when we do fundraising events, it's usually internal fundraising. So we have team members who will abseil or something and raise funds for that. But then how we put all that into practice is in supporting different charities. So we work with Coram, we work with Breaking Barriers or Carefree. A lot of different charities that share the same goal, like how can we make the lives of others simpler. But really the biggest part of Hotels of Heart right now is our academy. We have a hospitality academy that we launched last year and ran two successful academies. Four weeks we had 20 individuals per academy. goes through this training program, and these are previously homeless. Because we still house the homeless here at the hotel, so those individuals as well, those from difficult backgrounds. And we give them that training, and at the end of it, interviews with other hotel operators, as well as then hopefully they get offered jobs, but we also provide jobs for those we can. Oh, amazing. So that is fully funded by St. Giles and Hotels of Heart and that is where we see how we can make the most impact in really putting this Hospitality Academy, we have the experience that we now have of that on steroids almost and making it a year-long program. Wow, and what are your ambitions for Hotels of Heart? At some stage it would still branch out to be what we call for impact hospitality. So using our expertise of running hotels, also then our, I wouldn't call expertise, but experience of working with these disadvantaged individuals and homelessness, and now how education can work around that, it's to build a program and almost a community where it can be a life, almost like a year-long journey. So almost like what we have here, it would be a hotel that provides accommodation, training, and jobs. Wow.

Abigail: And you provide accommodation to people who don't have homes?

Emily: At the moment we work with the council, Westminster and Camden Council, so that's part of the story I missed out. How we started working with the homeless and roughscapers is that when Covid happened and we had to shut down the hotel, I reached out to some people in the council and I said, we have empty hotel rooms. We have staff who need to work and you have people, you have individuals on the street. So how can we work together to make life better for a lot of people? So then that's when it started in COVID and we still house them now. Oh really? And how many tenants do you have that are like that? Between 49 to up to 100 during the cold months.

Abigail: Wow, and then are they on, is that on dedicated floors or is it part of the mix of all the guests?

Emily: No, yeah, they have dedicated floors and sections. Where it's easy for us is because the building is split up into four towers. Oh, I see. One tower on the first floor and they have a separate entrance. There is full-time security and a representative of charity always on site to help to manage these individuals for any questions or concerns that they have.

Abigail: That's so interesting. And what do you find? I mean, have you talked to the people that are staying with you? Like, how did they end up homeless?

Emily: Yeah, and part of that learning about their stories is what's really so heartbreaking because sometimes one thing is a family breakup, divorce, or escaping an abusive family, or just even being disowned by a family and not having anyone. I think growing up in Asia, community is always so important. So part of who tells a part of that, how can we be that community for you if you don't have one or have it already? And these are their stories. It's so sad and it's how so easy it is to just fall into that. So part of the goal also is that how can we equip these individuals with the tools to work so that they avoid falling back into homelessness. and get to the younger generations so that they don't even get the chance to potentially fall into that situation.

Abigail: Yeah, that's such an amazing thing. And what I love about it is that not only are you helping with housing, but you're also offering them a pathway to become independent by training them and then offering them jobs. So that's quite a commendable thing. And you do that in partnership with the council? They provide you with some support?

Emily: Yeah, yeah. They help us with obviously some funding and then with introducing us to the charities that then send us the individuals. And where we said like this work I feel is so important for the future because exactly like you said, we're not just providing them housing. Because if housing is all they get, in a year's time they might be back in the same situation. How do you get them out of government housing into private housing, paying taxes, having jobs and planning to have a life again?

Abigail: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the thing. Most people want to work and they want to earn a living. It's not, you know, it's just difficult to get your foot in the door to acquire skills and to make that step when you had, you know, something devastating happen in your life that would cause you to be in that situation. That is such an incredible initiative. Looking back, I mean, what has been so far one of the most meaningful outcomes of the Hotels with Heart initiative?

Emily: One of them, I think, has been the relationships that we've been able to foster with the different charities that we have, those who run the charities, but also those who the charity supports. has been so rewarding. I remember at the graduation of our last academy, Andrew, who is the director of Hotels of Heart, and he's really the one I thank for getting it off the ground because otherwise it would still be an idea in my head. We were standing there and trying to hold back tears because you have these individuals whose lives you've changed because they stood there, they were so proud, they were doing all these interviews and we're talking to them post-interviews like, how did it go? and they were just filled with so much confidence from four weeks ago when they were shy and like not really want to speak to four weeks and when they're there they're like they see a pathway forward they see a future.

Abigail: Oh it sounds amazing and then it's interesting to me so you have put this as part of your branding for the St Giles and what's been the guests reaction to it?

Emily: So far it's been good. When guests see that their money goes that much further, like what we're doing with these funds, that it doesn't just go into somewhere and get lost a little bit. What we're working on over the next few months is how we can make this narrative and the story in-house to our guests even more pronounced. Because right now, we don't shout about it all over because we say it shouldn't be something that gets us a lot of press. It should just be something that is part of who we are. So we're trying to craft a way to see how we can get more fundraising, talk more about the initiative without it being, I don't know how to say, too in your face.

Abigail: I think that's a great way to say it, too in your face. It is risky. I mean, what you've done, you know, it's like you say, it's delicate to have that as part of your brand. I think also to have it, you know, in the building. Did that concern you when you were creating the program?

Emily: It did a little bit because then I would get people asking, oh, how are the guests going to react to having the homeless staying with you? And I said, you know what? It's all about perception and communication because you sit down with these individuals and there's nothing scary about them. It's how we've just been shown through whether it's media or you see what homelessness is and we're like, that's not really what it is. So for me, it's just a lot about changing people's perceptions and stigma with it. And just being almost like a beacon for communities, say like, look, we're here, what do you need? For example, something that I'm actually pretty proud of our hotel team for how quickly we managed to do it was we managed to reach out to UCLH, the UCL hospital that's right down the road from us. Again, we're saying, we have hotel rooms. You might have patients who need accommodation. And so, you know, we met with their neonatal ICU team on, I think it was one day of maybe a Monday. And they said, how is it going to work? We said, we don't know. But if you have someone, just call us and send them to us and we'll make it work. So that Monday evening, we had a call saying we have this mother who's just had a baby in the ICU. She needs somewhere to stay because it's too far for her to travel back and she needs to be near her child. So our hotel team, got everything ready. She was here with us by the evening, had a great night's stay. And she said it was incredible to be able to do that because all you want when you're a new mother is to be close to your child. And UCL had asked us, OK, there's so much red tape, so many documents that need to be signed, especially if you'll be using this for press and everything. And we're like, that's unimportant. We don't do this for the press. We're doing it to help these individuals, like this mother who just needed somewhere to put her head down.

Abigail: Amazing. Wow.

Emily: And that's what we try and tell the staff too, it's not about glory, it's just how can we make it part of who we are, not just what we do.