E.J. Hodgkinson and his staff are on a first-name basis with most of the unhoused neighbors who live around The Porter, the Atlanta beer bar he bought four years ago. Working at a bar in Atlanta’s Little Five Points, a neighborhood with a longstanding, visible homeless community, might mean calling the city’s nonemergency community response line for someone in crisis one day, or dialing 911 for an overdose the next. In nonemergency situations, “we have PAD and 311, and we can call them,” explains Hodgkinson, referencing Atlanta’s pre-arrest diversion program, an alternative to calling the police. “But sometimes we need to call an ambulance, like, right freaking now.”
Intervening in everything from overdoses to arson attempts requires balancing compassion and empathy with quick thinking and improvisation, not to mention the safety of everyone involved. But, Hodgkinson adds, “we generally just want people to be okay.”
For T. Cole Newton, running a bar has required him to balance hospitality with safety. Newton has owned Twelve Mile Limit in New Orleans’ Mid-City, an economically diverse neighborhood, for 15 years. “From early on, we would get people who wandered in who seemed to be in poor mental health and not receiving services,” he says. Some come to drink, others just need to use the bathroom or have a glass of water, which Newton doesn’t mind. Occasionally he’s had to intervene, like when a neighborhood regular’s unpredictable behavior became threatening. “But until you prove yourself a danger, we try our best to treat everyone the same,” says Newton.
Bartenders are no strangers to social conflict. But as rates of homelessness reach record highs, and mental health and substance use crises remain highly visible, these challenges are showing up literally at the doorsteps of hospitality venues, with workers on the front lines. Simultaneously, conversations about community safety have evolved beyond a reliance — and trust — of the police. Some bars are beginning to rethink their roles in the neighborhoods they serve.
During the pandemic, former bartender Mara Bethel noticed more of her unhoused Atlanta neighbors in visible distress. She saw the same familiar pattern play out again and again: “The cops keep getting called, and then they’d end up in this endless cycle where their needs still aren’t being met,” she says. “Sometimes people would go to Grady [Hospital] or sometimes they’d spend the night in jail, but then they’re back on the street, over and over and over again.” Her neighborhood is home to a lot of unhoused people, and a lot of bars. She wondered: Could the people behind those bars help break this cycle?
““I’ve been in this for a long time, and what I’ve learned is that anything that is happening in society finds its way to play out in the nighttime economy.” ”
So Bethel, who herself had been trained in mental health first aid, developed her own curriculum tailored to the service industry. She led three-hour sessions in Atlanta community centers, training hospitality workers in skills like active listening, clocking immediate versus potential crises, and offering verbiage to use when a 911 call is necessary (“ask specifically for a responder with training in mental health”). With funding from the U.S. Bartenders’ Guild, Bethel took her curriculum on the road, facilitating trainings for bar teams in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida. “It was really cool to see people step into transferring bartending skills into broader care skills,” says Bethel. That training isn’t just about diffusing tricky situations or avoiding unnecessary arrests. “It’s also, just, [how to] be a good neighbor,” says Bethel, who is now pursuing her master’s in social work.
Demand for these skills seems to be growing nationwide. Safe Bars, founded in 2013 to address gender-based violence, has expanded the scope of their training to help bars approach community safety more proactively. “Over the past two years, we’ve had more and more requests for training that specifically focuses on de-escalation and on responding to mental health crises,” says executive director Haleigh Harrold.
The trainings are tailored to a venue’s specific challenges, using concepts like power-based harm, active bystander intervention, and de-escalation to help staff notice and interrupt uncomfortable and unsafe behavior. They help bars create strategies like setting clearer boundaries at the door, keeping an internal incident log, or making sure staff knows when (and how) to call the nonemergency crisis intervention team instead of the police.
“The persistence of problems [like homelessness] has led to folks being like, ‘Okay, I don’t think this is going to solve itself, and so now we need to equip ourselves so that we can be part of the solution,’” says Harrold.
Allison Harnden, nighttime economy manager for the city of Pittsburgh, has been part of these conversations for years. In the early 2000s, she acted as liaison between San Diego’s nightlife industry and its local government. “I’ve been in this for a long time,” says Harnden. “And what I’ve learned is that anything that is happening in society finds its way to play out in the nighttime economy.”
In 2016, Harnden and her office started organizing free safety trainings for local nightlife venues. Now dubbed NITE School, these sessions have included trainings around active shooters, Narcans, and bystander intervention, but the most requested workshop right now, according to Harnden, is de-escalation and mental health first aid. Venues come to Harnden with questions like, How do I open my business when this person’s sleeping in the doorway? How do I engage with them in a way that’s respectful, but enables me to do my job? (The answer varies, but it always starts with compassionate communication.)
Harnden has noticed a shift not just in the scale of community safety issues, but in the attitudes bar teams take toward addressing them: more compassionate, more proactive. More hospitable.
“A lot of what we see, from owners as well as workers, is this desire to engage in a way that isn’t just like, ‘Get out of my bar,’ but how can we do what’s best for everybody involved,” she says. “I think there is sort of a sea change of attitude in hospitality workers and owners that is leaning into really caring for people.”
But like so much else that happens behind the bar, that care often plays out on the fly: Offering a glass of water, sensing a change in someone’s demeanor, deciding whether a situation calls for de-escalation or warrants more of a “right freaking now” approach. There’s no instruction manual — though maybe there could be. “I think it would be awesome if places in-house were like, ‘Here’s what we can offer as resources, here’s a little quick and dirty guide that we give to our employees for how they handle a mental health crisis,’” says Bethel. “That’s an ambitious aspiration, but I think it’s one worth having.”
This story was excerpted in Pre Shift, our newsletter for bartenders, restaurant workers and the hospitality industry. Subscribe for more perspectives like this in your inbox.