A Year in Review with USBG President, T. Cole Newton

USBG Weekly IGTV broadcast 12/21/2022 has been condensed to emphasize highlights and relay information relevant to this blog.

This month, USBG Executive Director, @Aaron Gregory Smith, spoke with USBG President, @T. Cole Newton, to recap 2022, discussing a few of the Guild's notable accomplishments, challenges, and pivotal moments.

Aaron - It's been a year and thankfully our bars are open again, so we're not contending with the same situation we had last year. And there are certainly a lot of things that went on in the world that held us there, glued to our screens, trying to make sense of it all, from mass violence, countries being invaded, politicians being investigated, fires, undrinkable water, the rise of antisemitism and anti Asian hate, inflation and more. It could all sound really depressing, but only if we dwell on that. And for today, we'd rather not. We would rather focus on how we persevered as an industry, how we came together in the face of tragedy. And for every negative thing that happened, there were more helping hands extended. So we continue to be in a period of growth and change in our industry, in the bar industry. And to do that, we need to keep driving that forward. We need to look back and learn so that our future steps are more informed. And today, to kind of reflect on this year and talk a little bit about how the USBG's year has been, our president, T. Cole Newton, is going to be on…

Cole - Hi, thanks for having me.

Aaron - Hi, Cole. Good to see you. I'm really looking forward to hearing your thoughts about what this year has brought for the bar industry and any particular things that stood out for you from your side.

Cole  - As the USBG President, it was unexpected… or actually more in the timing, I think. I was the vice president or appointed to the vice president at the beginning of the year, and then our beloved President, @Kim Haasarud stepped down to spend more time at home with her work and her family. We were sad to lose her at the top, but then I stepped into that role in May and it's been, well, I was expecting it to be a little more of a rocky road. It seems like this is the kind of gig you can only get by wishing out a curse monkey paw. But it turns out people have been very supportive, people have been very thoughtful that they've engaged and supported me in this new role, and it's been great. That's more of a personal note, I guess, or an organizational note, than for the industry at large, but it might be the biggest thing that happened to me this year.

Aaron - Right, well, as we are building on the kind of focus that you've been on as you took this role on the Board, the Board has really been focused on allyship this year. So, following the club Q’s shooting in Colorado Springs in November, the Board put out a statement, and it wasn't the only statement the Board put out this year. But could you tell us a little bit about the statement that we made and the one that we did earlier?

Cole - In the summer after the fall of Roe versus Wade were initiated by other members of the Board who surfaced these as concerns, I thought that these were issues that the organization would be interested in hearing the organization weigh in on. And so those issues were surfaced. We got together as a group at a full on impromptu meeting for the first one and then mostly handled the second one via text, but just sort of came to a consensus that this is a place where our voice would be welcome and appreciated. The club, Q one, especially, I think was very important to us because I think there's a recognition that bars specifically for members of the LGBTQIA+ community are places where they can find a refuge, where they can find community, where they can build a family of choice if they have not been welcomed by their family, as many of them haven't. And that's been the case for decades, but also for just as long, those same spaces have been violently attacked in a lot of different ways: gunfire, arson, police harassment, and just recognizing that the importance of those spaces both to the hospitality community but also to the LGBTQIA+ community, whichever alphabet soup is appropriate these days. And especially too, because a couple of the people who were killed in the club to attack were bartenders at that club and they were specifically members of our community. It felt important to stand in solidarity with the hospitality community of Colorado Springs that was hurting and the queer community at large in this time, as always.

Aaron  - Yeah, absolutely. I think it really goes to show that the Board and the USBG are really here for all bartenders and wanting to be making our spaces healthy is important. So, that's certainly a mission of the Bartender Emergency Assistance Program [BEAP]. But the organization goes further than that. It impacts our everyday engagement with guests and how we follow up with staff to help them make them feel welcome. And as we prepare these healthy spaces and welcoming spaces for people, the bar community, remember, the bar community includes the bartenders, our coworkers, our managers, media, our suppliers and distributor partners. And so the USBG also works to nurture these relationships. Talk a little bit about how that's important to your bartenders.

Cole - Our community, I think, spills into the name. We are first and foremost an organization for working professional bartenders, but the scope is so much bigger than that. So, in addition to the bartenders, we also have other people who are working in front of house in bars and restaurants, your cocktail servers and your bussers and barbacks, people who are working in the back of house, people who are making our food and doing a lot of the prep work sometimes from bars. Beyond that, we have people who are selling the products to bars, people who are buying it from us or enthusiast members, people who are producing it. Every individual module of the industry is critical. Any piece of that goes away from the customers, to the boots on the ground bartenders, to the other support staff in bars and restaurants, to the distributors, to the producers, any piece of that goes away, the entire industry falls apart. So at the Bartenders’ Guild, we really try to take a holistic view of the service industry, hospitality industry, and what the bar community means,

Aaron  - Yeah, I think that touches on our mission statement. We talked a little bit about advocacy and building relationships across communities, and taking a stand on important issues for our community. We talked about building those environments where all members of the bar industry are welcomed in. And then, one of the other key elements of our mission is education. So, any really notable educational accomplishments for the USBG this year? I know Education Week was a big deal in October - about that or anything else education-wise?

Cole - A lot of it comes from the brands, not going to lie, but a lot of that content is very valuable. A lot of the brands are doing very good work on education for their own products and for different classes of products, but also outside of their product sphere. And a lot of it sort of comes from top down. There's a lot of national energy put into creating educational content. Hopefully, we'll see more of that rolling out in the near future. Stay tuned. But a lot of what Education Week, I think, does is a really good job elevating the chapters and their efforts to create a system and a network for supporting chapters and developing their own educational content. Because a lot of what becomes national educational content starts at that chapter level first and creating the infrastructure for that, I think, is one of the things that Education Week has been very successful at over the years.

Aaron - Absolutely, I think so too. It's more and more popular.

Cole - Other nonprofit partners that we work with are able to do some education for our members and especially, like, Women of the Vine and Spirits [WOTVS], I think is a really strong partnership that we've had that's been able to provide training for bystander intervention, for sexual violence prevention and just how to make our bars not just welcoming, but safe for people. And that's very important. We're also continuing to explore more partnerships with organizations I think we could do a lot with: The Tales of the Cocktail Foundation, the Safe Bar Network. There are other organizations that I know that USBG is talking to about trying to get some of their educational materials in front of our members and just sort of amplifying each other's voices.

Aaron - Absolutely. In January, the Board is going to, as every year - we'll be reappointing officers for next year and the declaration of whether you'll nominate or be nominated or anything like that will happen next month. But if you were to kind of give us a rundown of what, three accomplishments you'd really like the Board to take on next year, what would those would you be happy to see happen?

Cole - The rollout of a strategic plan for the organization. There’s three pillars to that strategic plan: Advocacy, education and community. I think the advocacy piece is very exciting because it's very new for the organization. There's a lot of potential there. People realize that having a voice for bartenders, for the bar industry was lacking, especially over the 2021, 22 years. Not having that voice nationally, I think, was one of the reasons that our industry sometimes felt like it was left out in the cold. So identifying ways that we can come together, finding things that all of those different areas, like all the producers, the distributors, the bars, the bar owners, the bartenders, the guests, the ways that we can move the needle on some advocacy issues in a way that would improve the experience for all of those people. And finding those opportunities, I think, is very important in the advocacy piece. I think in terms of the community, we want to grow our membership, we want to improve the consistency of our membership from chapter to chapter and build a USBG community nationwide and lean into our global role. The USBG is itself a chapter of the IBA. The International Bartenders Association. So deepening those ties, making sure that people who are members of the USBG have an elevated experience regardless whether they're a member of a tiny chapter, whether they're a member of a large chapter, or whether they're not part of a chapter at all, making sure they can get value and community within our organization…