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When it’s at its finest, hospitality is low key. Think: seemingly effortless service at your favorite restaurant, with dishes inconspicuously cleared between courses and all the hard work hidden in the background. But there’s nothing low key about the upcoming election—47 days from today!—and Denver’s hospitality industry is uniting to make sure the voices of its many members are heard through a new initiative, Restaurants Rally the Vote.
The new, non-partisan effort is intended to support hospitality employees in voting in the 2020 election and beyond. The three-pronged Restaurants Rally the Vote campaign encourages everyone to get registered (or update their registration), alerts people when ballots are mailed so they can vote early, and, if they miss the mail-in deadline, assists employees in getting out to vote on election day, November 3.
“What COVID taught me, and a lot of my colleagues, is that together restaurants are a really powerful voice,” says Dana Query, co-owner/creative cat at Big Red F Restaurant Group (Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar, Lola Coastal Mexican, the Post Brewing Company, and others), a founding partner of the initiative. “We employ so many millions of people in this country, but we’re comprised of hundreds of thousands of small businesses, so it’s harder for us to activate. With COVID, we didn’t have a choice, but it’s been powerful and rewarding and sort of a magical process to see us come together.”
To keep that camaraderie going into the November election, local stakeholders from Big Red F Restaurant Group, Chook Charcoal Chicken, EatDenver, Snooze, an A.M. Eatery, and PR firm Baltz & Company created the Restaurants Rally the Vote pledge to ensure that hospitality industry employees are supported in voting and that their interests, however the fall on the political spectrum, are well represented in the election.
Not a hospitality pro? No matter. Restaurants Rally the Vote is ready to provide all the boring (but important!) details of how you can register vote, where to find local ballot boxes and voting stations, and when to start filling out your mail-in ballot. Basically, everything necessary to make it as easy as possible for employees—and you—to exercise the right to vote.
“It’s a lot of information sharing and motivating our teams to get out there and have their voices heard,” Query says. “It’s more important than ever for us to not only do the work, but for it to be visible. We want to do everything we can to support our teams [in voting].”
Sign up for Restaurants Rally the Vote here.
