Why Benefit Restaurants?
by Bob Perry:
“I had been “all business” until the late 1990s, when I began to grow more socially aware and interested in being of service. But I was quickly overwhelmed by the number and depth of the social problems confronting us. I more or less short-circuited emotionally searching for the one cause that I could commit myself to 100%. I simply couldn’t abide the opportunity cost of committing to one cause making me less or not available to others. And I despaired at the pervasiveness and the global scale of most social problems, coupled with the limited reach of most operative solutions.
As I grew increasingly aware of the multitude of effective nonprofits that are helping solve social problems – with more being created all the time by the growing family of social entrepreneurs – I gradually realized that there is a singular problem that is a tremendous distraction common to all of them: inadequate funding.
Simultaneously I also grew increasingly troubled by the inefficiency and waste embedded in most established nonprofit funding mechanisms – too much time and money spent raising money rather than working on the core mission.
The tipping point arrived when I realized, while struggling to shepherd my company through a series of threatening challenges in the 2000s, that my business would always need more of me than I had hoped. Time was passing. Global social problems were persisting… growing… and multiplying. And I was not helping…
Finally it dawned on me: Wasn’t nonprofit funding itself a problem worth helping to solve? And wouldn’t that help me fill my own need to address an array of problems, rather than focusing on only one?
And what if there was a way to create an efficient funding mechanism with global reach?
I kept coming back to the fact that restaurants are everywhere. Most people enjoy them. And I understand them.
Of course the idea of restaurants just giving money away is itself not sustainable. But clearly a significant percentage of people are inclined to support businesses that are active supporters of worth causes in their communities. And we have all seen that charities and nonprofits are eager to inform their stakeholders of whom is providing them with additional support. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that a virtuous circle that includes and connects restaurants, their customers, nonprofits, and their stakeholders could be established.
And furthermore, this virtuous circle could – and should – be made a continuous loop that just rolls along, capitalizing on the inertia embedded in our daily lives. Restaurants and nonprofits could both avoid the stress, uncertainty, extra efforts and costs associated with special events. – Restaurant Benefits are great. But they’re ephemeral, here one evening, then gone. And they’re a TON of extra work [and cost someone a ton of money] to stage!
Instead of more one-off or annual restaurant benefits, could we create Benefit Restaurants? What if we could build a model that generates continuous nonprofit funding from the energy we already spend, every dish, every drink, every guest, meal-after-meal, day-after-day? We wouldn’t need to ask anything extra from anyone – not from our guests, nor our purveyors, nor our staff. I believed deep-down, that people would care enough about any commitment we would make to do that to make such a commitment sustainable.
I’d finally found the answer I was looking for: This was how I could be of service to others that leverages what I already do, what I already know. A Benefit Restaurant™ would be a way to support – every day, and long-term – the incredible creativity and selfless of others; a model that is scalable, virtually frictionless, that includes powerful synergies, and is FUN.
With that, The Benefit Restaurant™ Project was born.”