Kirk Jackson
Customers retrieve a curbside pickup order from Joe T. Garcia's.
BOK Financial Corp.. parent of Bank of Texas, said it will contribute $1 million to support COVID-19 relief, including $100,000 to the Communities Foundation of Texas’s Get Shift Done fund to pay laid-off hospitality workers to perform “volunteer” shifts at nonprofits that work in the distribution of food to people in need.
BOK’s total contributions are focused on food insecurity and employment of hospitality workers, the bank said.
“During this time of uncertainty for so many, Bank of Texas wants to provide much-needed support for North Texas,” Mark Nurdin, executive vice president of BOKF Regional Banking and CEO for Bank of Texas Fort Worth, said in a release. “Our communities are our livelihood, and we feel our success as a community partner is based on the success of the communities where we live and work.”
Get Shift Done for North Texas Fund is a recently formed nonprofit launched at the Communities Foundation of Texas, launched by business leaders Anurag Jain and Patrick Brandt, the president of Shiftsmart, a staffing platform.
Jain and Brandt committed a total $750,000 to launch Get Shift Done and quickly increased the fund to more than $3 million in commitments.
Restaurants are among the hardest hit by COVID-19, first forced into social distancing requirements and then to shut down to all but takeout and delivery orders. The Texas Restaurant Association projects the state’s restaurants will shed more than 688,000 jobs and lose $4.2 billion in sales by the end of April. The TRA estimates that’s about a 70% drop in sales.
Get Shift Done, using the Shiftsmart platform, has been working on finding temporary work for furloughed workers at nonprofits like food banks that have seen demand skyrocket. Get Shift done ran a pilot at the North Texas Food Bank, where Jain is chairman.
“There was a real opportunity to place and match these displaced food workers,” Brandt said in a recent interview. Shiftsmart’s technology “allows us to do high-volume, high-velocity scheduling. We were off and running.”