From the Community: An interview with Patrick Brandt, President of Shiftsmart, Inc.
Welcome to the latest post in the “From the Community” blog series here on Curly W Live! In this series, we are highlighting the philanthropic efforts of the Nationals in and around the DMV.
Our blog post today features an interview with Patrick Brandt, the President of Shiftsmart, Inc. Patrick joined the Shiftsmart team in October of 2016, continuing his successful career as an enterprise software entrepreneur and executive. An active community volunteer, Patrick serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations focused on promoting education and entrepreneurship among at-risk youth, and encouraging philanthropy to emerging and established companies. Patrick and his family reside in Dallas, Texas.
So how are Patrick and Shiftsmart, a company headquartered in North Texas, connected to the Nationals and the DMV region?
In April, Washington Nationals Philanthropies teamed up with the Greater Washington Community Foundation and Shiftsmart to bring the Get Shift Done initiative to the Washington area. The Get Shift Done initiative was formed in the wake of COVID-19 in mid-March to offer an innovative solution to provide wages to hourly workers who serve shifts at local food access providers, answering the urgent need for hunger relief to their area’s children, elderly, individuals, and families in need. As jobless claims began spiking and increasing numbers of food bank volunteers were sheltering-in-place, Get Shift Done was formed to match displaced hospitality and service workers with local nonprofit organizations who provide meals for the food-insecure population.
Through an unprecedented philanthropic partnership, led and coordinated by The Community Foundation, local funders came together to support adversely affected hourly workers in the hospitality industry with paid shifts serving local food access providers and their constituents. The model provides direct income to the hourly workers and increases the amount of food that can be delivered to those in need.
To date, nearly one million dollars has been invested in Get Shift Done for the DMV. Founding investments from The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation, Capital One N.A., the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation, and the Bainum Family Foundation kicked off the initiative to ensure wages of $15 an hour to workers left jobless by the pandemic.
The initial group of workers in the DMV reported for their first day of work on Saturday, April 25. Since then, 1,891 shifts and more than 53,000 cumulative worker hours have been performed by 930 workers, supporting the service of 39 area nonprofit organizations and provision of more than 3.5 million meals for area residents facing food insecurity. The Community Foundation has also led the ongoing development of support from local foundations, which now includes Get Shift Done America and Washington Gas, as well as a recent $50,000 contribution from Washington Nationals Philanthropies through its NATS4GOOD Community Response Fund.
Get Shift Done for the DMV plans to continue operations through December 2020, and hopefully longer. Any interested restaurants, non-profit partners, and individual workers who would like to get involved with Get Shift Done can visit getshiftdone.org/dmv to get more information and access sign-up portals.
With Thanksgiving right around the corner, we wanted to share our gratitude for the partnership between Nationals Philanthropies and Get Shift Done by talking to Patrick about the initiative, the work they’re doing in our region and around the country, and about their important role in the COVID-19 pandemic response. We hope you enjoy!
Patrick, do you mind telling us a little about yourself and, for those that aren’t familiar with Get Shift Done, can you tell us about your organization’s mission and the work you do?
Patrick: First, thank you for the opportunity to extend our sincere thanks to Washington Nationals Philanthropies and all that have made it possible for Get Shift Done to support the DMV region. We are always humbled to support those who do so much to help others in the Washington D.C. area, as well as around the nation.
I live in Dallas, Texas and serve as the president and co-founder of Shiftsmart. Shiftsmart is a labor management technology platform that has a presence in over 20 countries with approximately 300,000 workers utilizing our platform. In a nutshell, we help shift workers find shifts, manage their schedule, and work across multiple employers. Some shifts are performed within our workers’ homes, while others are outside their homes.
In early March, we began seeing hospitality and other hourly workers get furloughed and laid off. As the pandemic started to quickly spread in the U.S., the hospitality industry was hit the heaviest at first. On March 13, when the stay-at-home guidelines were issued, many of our employers began laying off their personnel. My co-founder at Get Shift Done, Anurag Jain, at the time was the Chairman of the North Texas Food Bank and they were experiencing volunteers beginning to not show up for work to assist in packing and distributing food due to concerns about the pandemic.
That weekend we came up with the idea of the Get Shift Done initiative, where we would use the Shiftsmart platform to match unemployed hospitality workers with paid shifts in food banks to replace the volunteers who were sheltering-in-place. Our goal was to provide the workers with a basic wage to supplement their income. The hourly wage began at $10, but ultimately increased to $15 an hour, which prompted the decision that we needed to raise outside capital through private donations to create a temporary relief fund in order to provide workers with the higher wage. Several generous private donors and foundations understood the need and saw our model as a solution, and the money was raised very quickly. On Monday, March 16, we set up the fund with Communities Foundation of Texas, and on March 19 we had our first workers complete their first shift at the North Texas Food Bank.
Wow, you work quickly! Get Shift Done has been active helping communities across the country during the COVID-19 crisis. Can you outline the various ways you’ve been able to lend a hand and any changes you’ve undergone during the pandemic?
Patrick: Our mission was to bring stability to families and economies during a very unstable time. We were able to offer workers the opportunity to be paid to work and we were able to keep the food banks and food pantries delivering meals and food to those who needed them. We took one solution and addressed two critical needs, basic income and hunger relief. It ended up really catching the eye of the media and the next thing you know, we were on the CBS Evening News just weeks into starting this. As a result, other communities reached out to us and we began expanding very quickly. That is how we were connected with Greater Washington Community Foundation and Nationals Philanthropies.
When Get Shift Done began, we expected it to be a ten to 12-week local relief effort in our own backyard in Dallas. We were only going to work with four or five nonprofits because we have day jobs and we didn’t know how much money we could actually raise. As both the need for supplemental income and food surged, within ten weeks Get Shift Done was in 11 different regions, including Washington, D.C. We’re also in the six largest metropolitan areas in Texas, New Orleans, and two regions in Arkansas. We have 110 nonprofit locations where we are delivering food and we surpassed 50 million meals provided and 25,000 workers on the platform. We’ve also paid nearly $10 million of wages in that time period.
Frankly, we never thought we’d still be managing the initiative eight months later, but we’re going to continue at least through the end of the year, and we think that this is a model for the future. It’s shocking how much of the hunger relief infrastructure is built on the backs of volunteers and the school systems. We will continue to offer the program as long as there’s a need and we have groups that are willing to invest capital to fund the wages for the workers.
Get Shift Done recently partnered with Nationals Philanthropies to bring the initiative to D.C. When did that begin and what has the partnership been like between the Nationals and your organization?
Patrick: We began with Nationals Philanthropies with our first group of workers in April. It’s interesting; during the time of COVID-19, you couldn’t get on airplanes and you couldn’t have in-person meetings. We were starting this initiative and coordinating expansions in areas we had not visited, with people we had only met via Zoom. The introduction to the Washington Nationals was through a group called Stand Together. Lauren McCann with Stand Together introduced me to Tal Alter, the CEO of Nationals Philanthropies. Nationals Philanthropies quickly became our anchor in the D.C. area. They helped connect us with the leadership in the community and had the ability to pull key groups together including J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, and the Bainum Family Foundation. The connection to the D.C. community was central to the value that Nationals Philanthropies was providing because we weren’t able to remotely meet anyone from Dallas. We were very fortunate that the Nationals saw this as a great business model and introduced the initiative to the Washington, D.C. area.
I’d like to add that there’s a senior executive at Verizon named John Loveland who became a bit of an evangelist for us in the D.C. area. He used to live in Dallas and knew of our work there. John started to help raise the capital and coordinate with the nonprofits to execute the initiative in the DMV region. It was difficult to start something like this in unprecedented, tough, and constantly shifting times. Being able to bring all of these key people together virtually without most of us knowing each other and doing it all remotely from Dallas and creating something positive to help families and individuals of all ages put food on their tables was incredibly rewarding. It’s amazing to see how successful the initiative has been in such a short period of time under these unique circumstances.
How does the Get Shift Done operation in D.C. compare to your other sites? What has been the reaction from the D.C. community?
Patrick: That’s a really fun question because each region has been a little bit different. Our first expansion region was El Paso and that was with one funder and one food bank, so it was very concentrated and isolated. The Dallas area is definitely our largest and has the most nonprofits and people, but that’s because we started here and it’s our own backyard. Houston has the largest food bank in the country, and they manage all the food distribution and satellite organizations through their central location.
What’s unique about the greater D.C. area is that it is so geographically spread out and, of all the locations that we’re in, it’s the one that is the most geographically disparate in terms of just how big the region is, and maybe even how distinct the identities of those regions are. There’s also a variety of the types of nonprofits that are participating.
We saw that as a positive because in D.C. we were able to cover a wider map, but it also presented challenges because a worker living in Northern Virginia may have a harder time commuting to downtown D.C. to work a shift. It was an interesting challenge dealing with not just a city, but a larger region and a greater number of smaller organizations. Whereas in Houston and Dallas, we have these giant locations where 70 to 120 people are coming for shifts each day. Those are some of the key differences. We worked very closely with the Greater Washington Community Foundation to put everything together and they’ve been huge supporters.
I have had the great privilege of meeting many people across the country through the Get Shift Done experience, and one of the things that I value greatly is that both Nationals Philanthropies and the Nationals organization are using their brand in the community for good. In Dallas, we’re very lucky we have Mark Cuban who is just magnificent at using his brand and the Dallas Mavericks brand to support the community. It is heartwarming to see the Nationals doing that as well. I think that’s such an outstanding way to really leverage your brand in a positive way and for a good cause. I applaud the entire Nationals organization for recognizing their clout in the community and using it for good.
That’s very kind of you to say. So now that you’ve been in the D.C. area for a little while, what are the next steps in the process, if any? Are you guys looking to expand the operation in the nation’s capital?
Patrick: We are going to keep the program growing, at least through the end of the year. Even if a vaccine is available in the near future, it’s still a very uncertain time and uncertain future. As long as the DMV community will continue to support Get Shift Done, we will continue to manage and schedule workers for the nonprofits.
Unfortunately, I believe the need for hunger relief is going to be around longer than the capital is. Our plan is to continue to support the effort and work with Nationals Philanthropies, the Greater Washington Community Foundation, and John Loveland. We’re still doing work with Capital Area Food Bank, so there’s still a lot going on with the initiative in the region. My wish is for the donations to continue to help those who want to work make extra income and to provide the work needed at the food banks so they can place food in the hands of those who need help.
With that in mind, are there ways that people in the area help out? Is there a place they can donate?
Patrick: Yes, definitely! Donations are our number one need right now. It’s a beautiful donation model because your dollar is facilitating income for an out-of-work person and then getting food to the table of someone hungry. Donors are really giving a two-for-one donation and maybe even a three-for-one, because it’s helping to keep the nonprofits in the area going, too. Donations are by far the number one need right now. Otherwise, people can sign up to be a Get Shift Done worker by visiting getshiftdone.org/dmv.
We have a couple fun, quick-hitting questions to wrap things up. First, are you a baseball fan?
Patrick: I am a big baseball fan! As a matter of fact, I went to the World Series with my son last month because they were playing in Texas. The new ballpark the Rangers built is awesome. But I will say that it was so bizarre to be at the World Series, at the home of the Texas Rangers, and 95% of the people there were Dodgers fans. It was fun seeing the Dodgers play since my son, who is a first baseman and pitcher for his 14U Majors team, wears number 22 because Clayton Kershaw is one of his favorite players.
Then he must’ve enjoyed the outcome of the series. Do you have a favorite thing to eat at a ballgame?
Patrick: I have to say a ballpark frank. It’s just a classic. Normally, I’m a very healthy eater but I will make an exception for a ballpark hot dog. When in Rome!
It’s very hard to beat a hot dog and a baseball game! Thank you to Patrick for his time, and we hope you all enjoyed this post in the “From the Community” blog series. Please check back soon for the next one!
