Serving the Future

Serving the Future is a three-year action research project working with hospitality employers and workers. The project seeks to understand, reduce and prevent in-work poverty and identify changes that could be made within the hospitality sector. By working directly with employers and people with experience of low-paid work, the project is taking a variety of approaches to identify changes that can take place at an organisational level as well as necessary policy or systems-wide changes that are required across Scotland.

The objectives of the Serving the Future project are to:
• Identify actions that can be taken by individual businesses to reduce and prevent in-work poverty.
• Support employers to identify changes that will enable them to prevent their staff moving into poverty or to alleviate their levels of poverty.
• Identify and support transformational change to address issues of in-work poverty that can take place at an organisational level as well as necessary policy or systems-wide change.
• Provide businesses and their employees with the confidence to adapt to changing external conditions beyond the life of this study so that good practices are sustained beyond the project.
• Help Scotland to meet its statutory child poverty targets by engaging with both employers, parents, and caregivers working within the hospitality sector.

The Serving the Future project was born out of a recognition that the hospitality industry urgently needs sustainable solutions which improve the situations of both employers and workers. By working with both business owners and managers, and employees in the sector, we hope to contribute to these solutions through our research. Serving the Future is funded by The Robertson
Trust and is being delivered by the Institute for Inspiring Children’s Futures, the Fraser of Allander Institute and the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship (all based at the University of  Strathclyde), and the Poverty Alliance.