WASHINGTON, DC—Shawn Jervis, general manager of The Embassy Row Hotel, A Destination Hotel, here, was looking for a way his property could give back to the community to coincide with the completion of a $15-million floor-to-ceiling renovation. He needed to look no further than an organization he and his staff were very familiar with—SOME (So Others Might Eat), a community-based organization dedicated to serving the poor and homeless in the nation’s capital.
“I am really big on doing outreach and charity. So, we set up a team here at the hotel, and it would do different events almost every Saturday,” said Jervis, whose property will celebrate its grand reopening on April 16. “We did an event at SOME, helping feed [people]in their dining room, and it was like something I’ve never done before. I’ve done a lot of central kitchens and a lot of different holiday feedings, but this experience was completely different. They treated the visitors as guests. It is a very organized and home-like environment to come into.
“Since then, we have done a couple more feedings. We also went and played bingo with neglected and abused elderly at one of the locations. It has just been a huge win for all the people in the hotel. Then, it turned into us asking them what more we could do,” he continued. “For most hotels, you are looking for partnerships. So, Sarah [Vining], my director of marketing, and I want to have partnerships so that our guests can leave a little bit of themselves behind when they leave, and we can bring DC into the hotel. So, besides just writing the Constitution on the wall, we’ve decided to bring in local participants, and SOME, we felt, is a local charity. We met with its outreach people and have come up with a whole partnership with them. That’s our way of our guests giving back to the community, and a continuation of the employee’s outreach to SOME.”
SOME, which was founded in 1970, helps the poor and homeless by providing food, clothing and medical care, and empowering them to break the cycle of homelessness through the provision of job training, addiction treatment, counseling and affordable housing, according to the organization.
The partnership sees The Embassy Row Hotel contribute in three ways: through bookings of its SOME suite; through SOME ceramic bowls serving the chef’s special of the day in the property’s restaurant, Station Kitchen & Cocktails; and via a continuous break station that can be purchased by groups running an event within the hotel’s 6,650 sq. ft. of meeting space.
The SOME suite can be found on the eighth floor, called the Ambassador’s Level, where rooms have the best views and different amenities from the rest of the hotel, according to Jervis. The hotel donates 1% of the revenue generated from the bookings to SOME.
“It’s a corner suite and, instead of just calling it the Presidential or Royal Suite, we were searching for a name. SOME suite was kind of a fun play on the name, and it is also an identification for the guest, knowing that 1% of the revenue goes back to SOME,” he said. “Inside the room, there is a placard that explains the organization and what it is doing for the DC public. Outside is their logo with Suite attached to the end of it. It’s two rooms—a room with a king-size bed room and a living room, which also has a Murphy bed. It has a view of the National Cathedral all the way around to the Washington Monument.”
When a guest orders the chef’s special in a specially created SOME bowl at Station Kitchen & Cocktails, 25 cents will go to the charity. The bowls have been created by students from the Corcoran School of Art at The George Washington University, which already had a relationship with SOME, noted Jervis.
“We found out about the bowls from SOME itself. That’s one of the fundraisers that they do,” he said. “So, we asked if could participate in that, and we contacted the Corcoran School, which has made a little more than 100 bowls for us. They are all different sizes and shapes, with different glazing. I think they are very happy with the partnership. For us in the restaurant, it just looks cool.”
For meetings and events, the hotel features continuous break stations and, regardless of the size of the group, a percentage of the revenue derived from the stations will go to SOME.
“Our company has conference center hotels and, in those properties, they have the all-day break stations. So, a number of different groups don’t have to have individual coffee breaks—they can all just pay a fee to participate in a continuous break station,” said Jervis. “We put one in our hotel, and it’s first hotel in the city to have one of these things. We are giving 5% to SOME, which is a floating number for us. So, if we have a high-paying group or a lower-paying group, whatever we modify the break station to be, 5% of each group’s price is going to go to SOME. I think that’s the way a lot of groups are looking for great ways to give back to the communities when they go visit. We think this is going to be a big win for SOME and also for the groups. So, we are going to have some literature, like we do in the suite, in the continuous break station describing what it is contributing to.”
—Adam Perkowsky