Leveraging Hospitality to Create Social Impact

Hospitality is the relationship between a guest and a host, wherein the host receives the guest with some amount of goodwill, including the reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers. At the outset of the pandemic, it was clear that the industry that has been around for centuries would need to be reimagined to survive and perhaps come out stronger.

The World Health Organization (WHO) first declared COVID-19 a world health emergency in January 2020. Since then, the infection has sickened over 200 million people globally and taken the lives of 4.6 million people, while exacting a toll of more than $90 trillion from the global economy. One of the sectors that was hit the hardest was hospitality.

Enter trailblazers Donte P. Johnson and Jason C. Bass, who respectively serve as the General Manager and Director of Culture & Impact at Hotel Revival in Baltimore, Maryland. Their creativity, ingenuity and compassion sought to effect significant positive change to address the pressing issue of COVID-19 and its devastating effects. The two define hospitality as, “just taking care of people,” which is what they decided to do when the world closed its doors and they opened theirs.

Months of research, interviews with community leaders and some of their small business partners, writing and editing, culminated in a case study chronicling the stories, lessons learned and the path ahead for an industry in need of a new way forward. We are pleased to announce a case study, written by our CEO Clinton W. Mitchell, entitled, “Impact Hospitality: Creating Social Impact through Hospitality” has been published in a special issue of the Sustainability journal entitled “Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and the Making of Sustainable Change”.

“I’m immensely excited about the work Donte and Jason allowed me to do on their behalf and hope that this case study will not only help their peers in the hospitality and tourism industry create meaningful social impact, but that it may lead to greater attention to the double bottom line of profit and people in other industries as well.” -Clinton W. Mitchell, Diplomatic Enterprises CEO

We hope you will Read, Share, Enjoy and Take with you any lessons you may find helpful to your organization.

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