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It’s our core principle to build community and grow it by supporting our service professionals both professionally and individually. and it means the world to us to be able to offer this to our clients and guests. Clients often have commented and returned to HMG+ for events large and small because we are willing to make that commitment to our high standards whether it’s a coffee service for two or a conference of 1,000! According to Rober Murray when a company hires they should look for, “team members that not only fit the culture the leader is trying to build but also have the ‘right’ set of personality traits that cannot be trained.”

Today I’m proud that we were because a unique opportunity came to us through the New York Staffing Association: New York State’s Vaccine Distribution program. Our team was holding interviews and sending follow-up emails for two weeks to ensure the right people were sent to assist in the roll out of the vaccine here in New York City. During the pandemic, hospitality companies have been in a constant state of flux, but HMG+ has been keeping up with our community to ensure SPs have opportunities to support a return to normal. This is exactly what the Hospitality Industry needs and what our friends at the Academy for Hospitality Arts (AHA) have been doing: creating a Certification course for a COVID Hospitality Compliance Officer.

The Okra Project was founded in 2018 by Ianne Fields Stewart to serve healthy meals and fight hunger in the Black Trans Community. The Okra Project hires Black Trans chefs to prepare take away meals for those without housing, and to visit homes of those in need to cook meals. Serving people in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York, The Okra Project’s mission is to hire Black trans staff to visit the homes of Black trans people in need to cook healthy, home-cooked, and culturally specific meals. Ianne Fields Stewart is dedicated to shaking up the exclusivity of luxury by providing community events that are curated to the black trans people which provide wellness and pleasure that they wouldn’t normally have access to.

According to the Social Security Administration, “White households in the United States are far wealthier than Black or Hispanic households”, we know that Black equity has historically been far behind their white counterparts. Specifically, while white and Asian Americans hold one third of their assets in business and financial assets, Hispanics and blacks hold only 15 percent and 8 percent, respectively, of their wealth in these forms. According to the McKinsey Institute, “The Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that more than 40 percent of Black-owned businesses in the United States closed between February and April 2020, versus about 17 percent of white-owned businesses. Black business owners and the black community do not need kind words of equality, which indeed are welcome but insufficient to address the equity gap for the black community.