The Bartenders Benevolent Fund

The Bartenders Benevolent Fund has helped hundreds of Canadian hospitality workers during the pandemic.

In just over a year and a half, the Bartenders Benevolent Fund (BBF) has evolved from a Toronto-based nonprofit helping local bartenders and servers into a national support system for the many thousands of hospitality workers struggling to pay their bills due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The fund started in 2013 to help a friend who had broken his neck in an accident and couldn’t work as a result, says Jon Gray, the fund’s director and co-founder. Working as a bartender at the time, Gray understood how catastrophic an unexpected bit of bad luck could be for precariously employed hospitality workers like his friend. “There’s no sick pay, no benefits, nothing” for hospitality workers, he says. “If you don’t work, you don’t make money.”

For Gray, the pandemic underlined how vulnerable hospitality workers are when disaster strikes. In March 2020, and after getting a large donation from a spirits brand, the non-profit expanded from a Torontobased industry aid to a national support. Since then, it has distributed more than $720,000 to approximately 1,300 workers, with $305,000 of the money going to Ontarians alone.

The BBF, which relies on large donations from big spirits brands, as well as community and individual donations, offers four main financial supports to hospitality workers. “The emergency relief fund is our core support,” says Gray, “but we also offer a mental health fund and a tax return fund to pay for people to do their taxes.”

The BBF also encourages greater diversity in the industry through initiatives like its BIPOC scholarship for entry-level workers. In the future, the BBF wants to “ramp up” those offerings. Says Gray: “We want to use the platform COVID-19 has given us to create more equity in our national landscape.”