Rachael P. 

Onboarding Consultant — Payroll & Team Management

Toast.org, Toast’s philanthropic branch, brings Toasters all around the globe together to give back to their local communities. They do this in many ways, including a program called Local Committee Chairs. Through this program, Toasters are able to lead volunteer events, direct grant funding, and bring together other Toasters who live nearby. In our distributed workforce, this creates an invaluable opportunity to bring us all together and connect on a local level. 

Shortly after joining Toast, Rachael, an onboarding consultant eagerly volunteered to be her area’s Local Committee Chair and hosted her first volunteer opportunity this past spring. Learn more about Rachael’s passion for volunteerism below!

1. Tell me about your background. What brought you to Toast, and what have you been working on? 

I joined Toast in March after a 20-year run in hospitality, working in various restaurant settings, from high-volume sports bars, to fast-casual chains, to fine-dining powerhouses. I stepped away from restaurants at the height of the pandemic to work for a startup that allowed me to remain hospitality-adjacent, but also got my foot in the door for my first tech role.

Toast is a company I have admired for years, as both a customer and a restaurant patron, so when the time was right, I jumped at the chance to join Toast's Employee Cloud Onboarding team for Payroll and Team Management. I'm so happy to be here! 

2. How have you built a community at Toast?

Although I've only been here a few months, I have taken advantage of some of the incredible programs and social time that let our team shine. A few examples of how I’ve gotten involved include:

• Attending Leadership Coffee Chats
• Reading the 100 Words Project from the Tapioca Community as part of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month
• Participating in an array of Slack channels, including sharing recipes in the Cooking channel and getting my daily dose of happiness in the Pets channel
• Playing trivia with other Toasters around the world
• Following along with all of the great community projects being completed by Toasters for Toast.org

3. Why is it important to you personally to connect with others in the Toast community?

It's so important to feel part of a mission-driven, professional company that's also a positive force for good!

I am in awe of the community impact Toast has through Toast.org. I am based out of Houston and work remotely, so any opportunity to connect with my teammates is valuable to me. It's even better when we are meeting to complete a service project, followed by a hang session at one of our customer's spots!

4. You founded your local chapter of Toast.org. What was that process like, and why did you do it?

I am celebrating my 5-year with the Lone Star State in June. I moved to Austin initially in 2018, but found a home in Houston a year later.

In that time, I've learned that Texas is big, y'all, (no, like really, really BIG), and so is Houston. Harris County has 4.6 million people in it, and if it were a state, it would be the 25th largest in the country. I saw that there was a shared Toast.org chapter for Texas Toasters (including Austin, Dallas and San Antonio), but there are hundreds of miles in between the four cities, which makes organizing an in-person event challenging. Local chapters were beginning to form, and Houston had never held an official volunteering event, so I jumped in to organize an event for our Toast to the Earth campaign.

5. Tell me more about your most recent volunteer event. Which program did you partner with and why did you choose them?

One of the hard truths when working in hospitality is the amount of food waste you see. I found the waste particularly hard to stomach (no pun intended) while working fine-dining private events. Chefs are asked to prepare for a certain guest count, but there is usually so much leftover at the end of a catered event. I was thrilled to discover Second Servings, the only prepared and perishable food rescue in Houston. Their mission is to alleviate hunger and reduce waste by rescuing surplus food from businesses and conducting free same-day delivery to approved charities. I was paired with a driver from Second Servings as a "second seat" volunteer. We drove around the city in a refrigerated van to pick up food donations from grocery stores, produce wholesalers, commissary kitchens, and bakeries. One of our Toast customers was a food donor, which was awesome. 

Then, we drove the donations directly to community members in need — we stopped by a college pantry, a veteran's center, a rehabilitation center, a women's shelter, and a low-income housing development. We filled up our van three times in one shift and provided hundreds of meals, and we were just one team in action that day. Second Servings operates their fleet of five refrigerated vans five days a week year-round. 

It felt only right to nominate this non-profit for the Employees Grant Challenge — and I am proud to say they were the recipients of a $5,000 grant! The grant will fuel Second Servings vans for more than 3 months, enabling their volunteers to rescue an amount of food equivalent to nearly 800,000 meals.

6.  What are you most excited about for the future of your Toast.org chapter?

I would love to work with Second Servings again to organize one of their "grocery popups" for a residential community. We would arrange the food donations as a "grocery store," and then the residents "shop" through the aisles for free.

This is a great way to introduce nutritious ingredients to residents who lack access to good groceries and to bring healthy food to people who can't shop on their own. Sometimes, the donations can be intimidating to residents because they have never eaten the ingredients or dishes before (ex: greens like arugula, mizzuna, swiss chard, prepared falafel). To have a Toaster be there to guide residents through their selections would be wonderful for all involved.