Blog. As the industry re-opens it's time to take stock

As hospitality prepares to re-open in much of the UK, now is as good a time as any to take stock of what’s been a truly remarkable year for Hospitality Action. Against a backdrop of huge loss and anxiety, and thanks to your generosity, we’ve been able to make more of a positive impact in the last 12 months than ever before.

Hospitality Action receives no government funding. And, due to ongoing social distancing regulations, we still remain unable to plan many fundraising events which have traditionally been the backbone of our fundraising programme. We need to raise every penny we spend on grant-giving ourselves.

Back in those odd times of March 2020 when calls on Microsoft Teams were somehow new and novel our first crisis meeting ended with a simple statement ‘We can’t help everybody, but we’ll find a way to help as many people as we possibly can’.

And that’s just what we did.

In 2020 we spent £1.36m and awarded 4,698 grants, compared with £733k on 2,282 grants in 2019. This is an 86% increase on funds spent and the most the charity has ever spent in a calendar year, with a 106% increase in households supported. Already this year we have awarded approximately £300k in grants to over 1,000 beneficiaries.

All the while our carefully-nurtured fundraising programme evaporated before our eyes as event after event was cancelled. We got creative, and ideas like the 20,000 Mile Hospitality Challenge and Invisible Chips captured the imagination and helped steady the ship.

2020 also saw hundreds of companies and individuals raise many thousands of pounds in our name. Our supporters brewed beers, distilled gins, baked cookies, and stitched facemasks, all to help our hospitality brothers and sisters through their innovative and imaginative fundraising.

I’m immensely proud of my team and the fantastic industry whose generosity and trust gave us the platform to achieve what we have in the last year. So many achievements - there are just too many to list here, so please click the button below to download our Impact Report which details our response to the pandemic in 2020. We're proud of what we achieved and hope you'll feel equally proud of what you contributed to. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Download our Impact Report.

To come back to Churchill’s point. I sincerely hope we’re past the worst the pandemic can throw at us and we’re as excited as you are to see the industry re-open. But one thing is crystal clear to me, for as long as you’ll keep supporting us, we’ll keep helping hospitality people impacted by Covid-19 or whatever as yet unknown, curveballs life has in store for them.

We’re in it together, and we’re here for the long haul.

We’ve got you

Mark.