Offering Hope Through Hospitality: How We Worked with St. Giles Hotels to Create Opportunities for our Community - Greg Früchtenicht, Saira Hospitality

Josiah: Today, something really cool is happening in London. A class of promising new hospitality leaders is graduating from a program that shows us all the power of hospitality and creating opportunity for those around us. In this episode, I want you to hear Greg Fruchtenicht, the Chief Operating Officer of Syrah Hospitality, tell the story of how they worked with St. Giles Hotels to create this program, what it included, and what they learned in the process. Keep listening to get inspired by the power of hospitality at work. 

Greg: So currently, we have a program running in London, and it's a truly unique program in that it's been sponsored 100% by a hotel brand called St. Giles Hotels. But it's unique in the sense that actually, St. Giles as a business has a kind of philanthropic arm of the company that they call Hotels with Heart, which I think is a really nice name. And Hotels with Heart was specifically set up by the CEO and her team to help impact and support the communities that are living directly outside of the property. Now this is a big 750-room hotel in the middle of London and unfortunately in that area of London there is a lot of homelessness and there's a lot of people sleeping on the street and so what St Giles does through this philanthropic arm is every Q1 of each year they actually take in a huge group of kind of street sleepers with the support of the local councils, and they give them a roof over their head, three square meals a day, a bed to sleep in, which, again, some of these individuals haven't had a bed for a long, long time. And so they're doing this each year, and they're having an amazing impact in that respect. But this year, they've gone kind of one step further, and they've actually worked with Syrah Hospitality to create a training program inside that hotel. So for the past four weeks, we've been, our trainers have been going in each day, and working with a group of these individuals who are also staying in the hotel to help them upskill, to help them understand the hospitality industry, and at the same time also help support them with finding private rental accommodation so they will not be going back on the street afterward. And yeah, it's a truly unique program, and hats off to the guys at St. Giles because they're truly forward-thinking, and it's such a pleasure to be a part of that.

Josiah: I'd love to hear about the origin of this. How did it all come to be?

Greg: So I met Abigail Tan, who is the CEO of St. Giles, just as I'd started out with Saira Hospitality, so about two and a half years ago. And it was one of those amazing meetings where I think we had like 30 minutes in the diary because she's an incredibly busy person. And we were in her office for like two hours, just talking about hospitality, talking about the issues in London, specifically with, you know, this homelessness problem. And at the time, Saira Hospitality in London was, it was yet to launch. So when I came on board with Saira, it was really to bring our global pop-up on board. and bring that to London to make it a more sustainable kind of ongoing set of training programs each year. So we weren't quite ready to partner at that time, two and a half years ago, but we had this just crazily inspiring conversation and kind of that stuck with me for a long time. And then the team at St. Giles got back in touch with me last summer, and they said, look, we've now actually hired someone full-time to work on Hotels with Heart, which is the kind of ESG philanthropic art, And we'd love to pick up that conversation that we had two years ago. And from there, the ball just really started rolling and it's developed into, I mean, probably one of the most memorable four weeks of my life today, I'd say in terms of the, it's such an honor to actually get the chance to work with these individuals because they are so motivated to get into work. And I think there's a many preconceptions around people who are sleeping on the streets. And I won't go into all of them, but I think maybe one of them is that they're there for a reason or that they're not motivated to try and change their lives. And I can honestly say from working on this project that that's just not true. And so we're super excited because yeah, this is the first time that we've done this with St. Giles, but we're hoping that you know, each Q1 of the years to come, hopefully, for a long time, we'll set up these training programs. And yeah, we would love for this to be a bit of a beacon for other hospitality businesses that might be able to support in similar ways.

Josiah: Is there something unique about hospitality businesses and being able to support people in this way? Because there are a lot of really important not-for-profit organizations doing good work in our cities and serving people in different ways. But hearing you describe this makes me so excited because it taps into fuels all elements of a hospitality business in the most basic level of being shelter. It's literally a bed and a roof. And then it's also a big employer of people. There's very much an apprenticeship sort of model built into a lot of learning how to provide hospitality. It feels, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like hospitality businesses are in a really unique space to address issues like this that are comprehensive, complex, and support people in a very meaningful way.

Greg: I completely agree with you. I think, you know, hospitality is one of the oldest acts of time probably, right? Like, like you say, providing shelter, providing safety, and that's obviously spun off in the past, however many years to become. Now we have luxury lifestyle brands and now we have all of these different facets, but when you boil it straight back down to the kind of impetus of it all, it is about supporting and helping people. And I think the real line that we can draw between that and our curriculum and the way that the combination of those two things can help individuals move into a different space is the fact that hospitality in of itself is purely driven by these amazing life skills, which you and I and many of my peers and friends, we may have been gifted these or given these from our parents or our teachers or our friends, but so many of the individuals that we work with have not been fortunate enough to have that. When we get a platform like this partnership with St. Giles, where they're actually doing the shelter and they're doing the housing and things like that, and then we can then start to layer on top. These are the kinds of skills that are very important in hospitality, but also just in day-to-day life, things like communication, things like emotional intelligence, which we teach, things like leadership, which I think Many of the candidates, again, that we work with, you say that you are a leader. We tell them that they can be a leader and they really don't believe it at the start of the program. You can start to see towards the end that they understand that. And then we start to hear these wonderful stories about graduates from CSIRO of years gone by creating leaders of themselves. it all comes back to the premise of hospitality and the fact that it is, in my view, the perfect place to take individuals who have fallen upon hard times for whatever reason and help them build back up those life skills so that they can integrate back into society. Truthfully, we want everybody to work in hospitality that comes through our programs. But also, I think just for one of our students to come into a classroom for four or six weeks, five hours a day, five days a week, they build these life skills there and they build this sense of community with the other individual students in the classroom. So yes, we would like all of these individuals to move on into hospitality, but I think even just showing them what hospitality can do for them will really help them develop themselves. And then, hopefully, they can move on to great things at the end of the program.

Josiah: What you've done with St. Giles is very inspiring. And I want our listeners to imagine what this might look like in their context by understanding some of the challenges that you had to work through. You addressed some of these. You talked about in the city, in the neighborhood, there is a lot of homelessness. I'm in San Francisco. There's a lot of homelessness here as well. I think a lot of cities are faced with this. So that was the challenge, the partnership that you put together, the program, in partnership with St. Giles helped address that. You talked about the challenge of participants feeling maybe like they're not leaders or not up to the challenge of working in this sort of way. So you had to address that through the program. Can you speak either more to that or to other challenges that you saw that you had to work through for this program to be the success that it is?

Greg: Absolutely. And, you know, as I was saying earlier, it's, this is one of the most kind of inspirational projects that we've worked on, certainly in London. But it's certainly been, you know, one of the most challenging just due to the demographic that we are working with. And Saira Hospitality, in essence, is so driven by partnerships. And I think that's why we're able to have a really big impact because We certainly, me and our team of trainers and project managers, they're not experts in homelessness, but we work with other non-profits and charities in London and around the world who are. And so we have these experts that can come and weigh in and help us, whether that helps us actually find the students in the first place or help them overcome

Josiah: You've taken these participants through the process to graduation, such a milestone. And as you look back on this experience, what stands out to you? What have you learned? What are you most proud of in working with St. Giles on this?

Greg: Yeah, there are many reasons to be proud of our team here in London and all of the work that they deliver and all of the impact that they have. There are also so many reasons to be proud of each and every one of the students, but there are a couple of kinds of individuals that really stand out just as going above and beyond and showing us hospitality as Saira Hospitality, ironically. So one of our students is a Syrian refugee and she's, again, we talk about the hospitality gene. If there was a poster for the hospitality gene, she would be on the front of the poster. And, you know, at the start of this week, she's really excited. She's going to graduate on Friday. It's a really big event. And so, yeah, on Monday this week, she kind of came in and she, she cooked a Syrian feast on Sunday. So all of these amazing flavors and dishes, like, I don't know how she carried it all to the training program, but as we kind of came to the program, she arrived and she was just carrying these trays of incredible things. And, you know, she brought the cutlery, and she brought some plates, and she just invited us all to share a taste of her life before she unfortunately, you know, had to flee to the UK. And there are many, many moments that are pretty emotional during every program, but just seeing each of the other candidates kind of, they were blown away as much as we were, you know, no one had really done that before. And I think We're being educated this whole time as well. So she was telling us about the food. She was telling us about the fact that the way that her grandmother made, used to make it and things like that. It's like, we feel honored that we actually get taught quite a lot through these programs as well. It's not just a one-way street, you know, that each of the candidates comes, and they have something to teach us about.

Josiah: It's an incredible story. I think people listening to this will be very inspired hearing what you've done with St. Giles, and maybe they're thinking about their own hotels or their own business, how they might do something like this. Where can they go to learn more about Syrah Hospitality and get in touch with you?

Greg: So you can find a lot of information on the website, sairahospitality.com. We also have an inquiry form on there as well for anyone who would like to get in touch, and we monitor that daily. So we like to think we're quite good at getting back to people and then If you're able to spell my surname, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's not that hard actually, once you get it, but yeah, I'm, I'm always on there and really interested to speak to anyone inside and outside of hospitality. That's just curious about what we do. Cause yeah, we partner with different organizations from tech brands to operators to other NGOs and yeah, all the whole thing. So, I am more than happy to chat with anyone.