Episode 42.5 - Unpacked: Centering Workers, Strengthening Businesses feat. Bonny Yeager and Bishara Addison

Historically, the restaurant industry is one of the trickiest for workforce development partnerships. It’s a low-margin, low-wage sector, where the work can be physically demanding, unpredictable, and often undervalued. But change is possible. In this episode of Unpacked, we hear from two of our Network Partners, Bonny Yeager, Senior Manager of Industry Solutions, Partner4Work in Pittsburgh and Bishara Addison, Director of Workforce Innovation, Fund for Our Economic Future in Northeast Ohio, who are helping restaurants reimagine what’s possible through our Centering Workers in Job Design initiative.

Together, we explore how they’re engaging restaurant employers to co-design jobs with their employees and how this human-centered approach is improving retention, boosting worker satisfaction, and strengthening business performance. We’ll also dig into what it really takes to build trust with employers, sustain partnerships, and equip workers with the skills and information they need to take a more active role in shaping their work and their futures.