At a time when most theatre folks are looking for ways to fill their days, Joanna Carpenter has been busy. She’s meeting me between meetings as the grassroots organization she started last year continues to evolve.
“We’re kind of off to the races this year,” she tells me. “We are going to be partnering with a New Orleans-based organization that also does equity and racial justice work in Nola, along with a couple of other organizations and nonprofits to basically create a massive seismic cultural shift in the hospitality industry from the perspective of racial and gender and language justice.”
Like I said, she’s been busy. To ask her what she’s been up to this past year is to ask her to detail the steps taken in a marathon.
But before she had made a name for herself fighting for equity in the hospitality industry, Joanna was a kid from outside of Kalamazoo, Michigan.
“I claim Kalamazoo,” she says, “but I’m technically from a very small, three-stoplight town called Vicksburg. So Kalamazoo County, but I grew up in a little farm town.
“I’ve been singing since I was four. I did my first show in 7th grade; I was in the kids’ chorus of Joseph. And I did theater all through high school and kept singing, but I didn’t do community theater. I didn’t really have that standard trajectory, and I also didn’t go to college for theater—I didn’t really go to college. So my first experience with actual full productions was booking my first summer stock gig after I moved to New York.”
To move to New York City and try to make it in theatre without formal training can be a risky decision for young adults to make, and I ask Joanna what that transition was like.
“It was rough,” she says. “Basically, I had a massive falling out with my mother when I was 18, right around high school graduation. At that point, I was an athlete—track and field was my jam. I wanted to go to a Division II, liberal arts school; I wanted to major in marketing. I had a plan set up. And my mom really sabotaged it at every turn.
“I would come home to a scholarship award letter and she would tell me it wasn’t enough, and I couldn’t go there, and I just didn’t question it because I assumed that my parents knew better. And then come April of my senior year, the letters stopped coming because I didn’t pursue them—because I didn’t know how, I didn’t have support, I didn’t know what student loans were, I didn’t know that I could apply. And I turned around and saw all my friends getting ready to graduate and prep for the summer before their freshman year, and I realized that I had nothing.
“So I went to join the military. I did ROTC training for the Army National Guard; I was going to go military police. Especially as a woman, there was a little bit of an ego thing there, because a lot of dudes were like, ‘oh, you can’t be MP’ and I was like, ‘watch me.’ And this is in 2004, so we’re at the height of the Iraqi invasion and the height of the war in Afghanistan, and I was ready to go. The recruiter came to my house to sign off on the final paperwork, and my mom flipped out and threw him out, and that was the end of that.
“So, at this point, every opportunity that I had been aware of had been taken away from me, and I didn’t know what to do. So I moved out of my parents’ house and moved in with a dear friend and his mom. Made some really poor decisions for a couple of years, and then got back on my feet—really kicked off a career in hospitality, tried to go to community college, hated it. I was doing a lot of modeling for a few years over in Detroit; they would hire short girls to do runway shows because it wasn’t a fashion scene, so I got hired to do a lot of runway. I met an agent from New York, from one of the big offices, and she was like, ‘you need to move to New York.’
“So in 2009, after five years of drifting in a lot of ways, I picked up everything and had $500 in my pocket, and came here with no friends and no support structure, no idea what I was doing, and no college education to tell me how to audition and what a rep book was and…dove in.”
Luckily for Joanna, she was able to ease the transition by relying on her experience in hospitality—experience that she was practically born into.
“The Chinese side of my family came over during the late 70s; they’re from just outside of Beijing. They landed in West Covina, California, and then somehow made their way to Portage, Michigan. The first thing they did was open a restaurant called Peking Palace. It was just the most ornate, beautiful place, and it was my grandparents’ life.
“And on my mom’s side, my grandparents opened a roller skating rink in 1952. And when I say ‘opened a roller skating rink’, my grandfather laid the cedar planks for the skating rink floor by hand.
“So hospitality has always been in my blood. When I moved to New York, it was where I was comfortable.”
Joanna landed a job at Swing 46, a jazz club along New York’s Restaurant Row. There she waited tables, tended bar, and honed her swing dancing skills before moving on, but she stayed committed to the hospitality industry, developing a specialization—and a passion—behind the bar.
“I created a craft beer education organization, where I would partner with local nano breweries and host and produce events that focused on supporting local breweries —usually specifically geared towards women. And then I got swept up into the cocktail scene, and I got hired by a small distillery and helped build their market for them. I moved into running my own programs and consulting for some global brands—not only cocktail programming and trade outreach, but what diversity looks like in an old boys’ club industry. The through line has been diversity and equity advocacy, which has evolved into diversity, equity, and inclusion education.”
Working in food service isn’t rare for performers; countless actors find work in restaurants to subsidize their artistic pursuits. However, very few transition into activism within the hospitality industry—and that’s just what Joanna did.
“The hospitality industry is built on the backs of exploited labor,” she says. “You go back to the Reconstruction period in the 1860s and 1870s: poor white people refused, even to their detriment, to take service jobs—because that was the work of slave labor. They believed it was beneath the average white person. And that really set the tone for the culture that we experience today—especially in coastal cities, because there is such a large portion of the working population that is undocumented. Many employers pay undocumented labor less than they pay white labor because they can, because the undocumented person needs a job, and they’re not going to complain because it’s not safe for them to complain.”
As she watched these inequities grow due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Joanna felt compelled to act. Alongside friend Cameron Shaw, she formed an organization: 86 the Barrier.
“86 the Barrier was originally born as an emergency response concept. I saw that with the closure of restaurants across New York City in particular, we were going to be seeing an immigrant labor force and non-English-speaking labor force that was trying to emerge out of closures into a heavily saturated job market, where language bias pretty much always guarantees that the person who speaks English fluently is going to get the job.
“Employers do not have the bandwidth, or they say they don’t have the bandwidth, to invest in language education. Employers are not bilingual; they have not made the move to become bilingual and meet their labor force where they are.
“The undocumented community is the first to suffer, not only at the hands of an airborne virus, but also at the lack of access to government benefits. I’ve been on unemployment since the middle of April; my undocumented coworkers cannot access that unemployment. And that feeds into food scarcity, housing scarcity—there’s not a thing in our world that this doesn’t touch.
“So originally, we were like: ‘how can we give people English language skills’—not because there’s anything about them that needs to be fixed, because the bilingual, trilingual, multilingual people in our world, those are the superheroes. But how can we give them the language tools to navigate an unjust working space while we try to make a more just system as a whole?
“What it’s now evolved into is a parallel Spanish as a new language and English as a new language curriculum, with the goal of having all people who work in a restaurant meet each other in the middle. It’s about making a safer, more equitable space.
“The plan is to expand to multiple markets: the West Coast, the South, Chicago, large immigrant hubs with large Spanish-speaking populations. We’d also like to expand to other languages—Creole, Chinese, French—depending on the location. It all comes down to the fact that, with an industry built on exploited non-English-speaking labor, if we don’t change this, we will continue to cement in white supremacy and cycles of exploitation from generation to generation.
“Whereas you find one immigrant who doesn’t speak English, and they get those English skills, they can go back and reinvest in their family, in their community, in their neighborhood, in ways that they have not been empowered to do before.”
While Joanna had found inspiration to help her hospitality community in the aftermath of the pandemic, she was also mourning the loss of theatre. She had been in a staged reading of a new musical up until COVID forced the closure of both of her industries.
“Our performance day was the 13th—when everything shut down. We were in the midst of audition season, and I was in final callbacks for a show that was supposed to go up in June. Over the course of the next couple of days, with the restaurant shut down in New York City, I effectively watched both of my worlds crumble around me.
“I think I can look back at it now and go, ‘oh wow, that was really traumatizing.’ But you put one foot in front of the other; you figure it out.
“My first question was: ‘my communities are in pain—how can I be of service?’ I dove into pinpointing where there was a need and where I might have been able to fill a need, and that was helpful for me because being in action is helpful for me. So I just moved. And, you know, things kind of evolved out of that.
“I’m a political junkie and I always have been. I’ve been observing the Senate behavior for the last couple of years, and the power of the majority to serve as a blockade to growth and progress. And I was paying attention to what people were saying online about their financial straits, and I was watching the pandemic response. When they passed the CARES Act I was like, ‘okay, great!’ But then I heard rumblings of conversations like, ‘this is never going to happen again.’
“So when the loss of the FPUC—the additional $600 in benefits—started to loom, I was watching so many people feel powerless to fight for their financial safety. And so I hopped onto Facebook and was like, ‘if I build a database of all the information that we need, and write scripts for you if you’ve never phone-banked before, would anyone want to hop on and start calling our senators to work in favor of extending the FPUC?’ and a whole bunch of people showed up.
“We ended up doing these three days a week. Over the course of a couple of months, there were, like, 100 different people that cycled through, and I had a core group of amazing people who were with me every step of the way. A friend sent me a direct contact list for Senate staffers who worked on finance and budget and economics and community work and all that stuff, so I started reaching out to them asking for meetings, and I was granted about 17 meetings.
“The plan was always going to be to pivot out of financial conversations into retaking the Senate. So eventually I flipped to teaching my phone banking crew how to get their national networks galvanized to come up with a voting plan—not only to make a plan to vote, but to understand the nuances of voting in a pandemic, and how to have conversations with their network simply about the logistics and not about the candidates.
“And that culminated in taking a team to Atlanta for Election Day to provide voter support; there are eight of us that went down, and we hit about twenty different voting precincts. It was kind of a natural progression of things that made sense based on what we were seeing happening in Washington.”
While Joanna is clearly motivated to help, she warns against providing help in ways that aren’t appreciated.
“When I took my team down to Atlanta, I had been talking with organizers in Georgia for months. If they had not said to me: ‘this is what is needed,’ I would not have gone. We were responding to a stated need. A lot of people who don’t live in the communities that are affected most deeply, they are so eager to help that they assume that they know what is best for that community—without talking to that community.
“There is a lack of nuanced research that we do into the communities that we supposedly are supporting with our money, our time, our phone banking, our text banking, our postcards, our actions. And what I want to dig into, with this new administration and with more of a nuanced look at politics in action at the local level, is what it’s like to understand where your place is. Atlanta, Georgia, did not need me to go down there again and hand out granola bars; what they needed was support for organizers that have been on the ground for many years.
“So, I caution against saviorism because it stems from, very often, a supremacy mindset that has been tempered with the best of intentions. Before we jump to action, supposedly aiding communities that supposedly need us, we need to talk to those communities. We need to listen to those communities. The people who are the best at relational organizing are the people who are on the ground. I want to get us out of the mindset where we think we know better.”
What comes next for somebody who seemingly doesn’t stop moving?
“I’m studying my craft,” she says. “I’m pivoting into television and film and focusing on Shakespeare and straight plays. I’m doing a deep dive into Shakespeare with a coach who is just incredible and I’m in script analysis classes, so I’m coming back to my art and my craft in a way that I want to do it.
“86 the Barrier is growing rapidly, and I am so excited to see how we are able to be of service to not only the communities in New York who need us, but the communities on a national basis who need us over the coming months and years.
“I am the co-founder of an initiative called Will You Miss Us When We’re Gone, a campaign to save NYC bars, which is a public education campaign. We are seeking to bridge this fatal gap in understanding between what guests think happens at restaurants and bars during COVID and what’s actually happening—and how neighborhoods, not government, are going to save our local bars and restaurants. I’m working on that with two incredibly powerful women, Daniella and Megan, and we’re making progress.
“And I think, overall, 2021 is the year where I finally choose me. I’m focusing a lot on choosing me and figuring out what I need from my career, from my space, from myself, from my network, from my inner circle—and how we are all navigating that while we are still in survival mode. And hopefully coming out of survival mode before the end of the year.”
It may sound counterintuitive coming from somebody who’s spent so much time working for the advancement of others, but Joanna argues that working on oneself is the key to moving forward.
“Self-care is really important. When my gym is open, I work out twice a day. I box twice a week. I am constantly active because when my body is taken care of, my spirit is taken care of.
“At some point, even if you feel like you’re kicking and screaming, you have to take care of yourself. That means not drinking a bottle of wine every night; that means not doing a bunch of drugs and sleeping until noon. That means getting up at 9am, making coffee, and establishing a routine. That means carving out space for yourself to read in the middle of the day, even if you have a busy day. That means asking for help if you need it. If you have to do it kicking and screaming, do it—do something, and do it for the You of five minutes from now.
“We, as individual communities, as individual humans, and I think as a collective society, are learning about the power of empathy. Empathy is the great unifier. When you have brushes with your own mortality, it makes it so apparent just how important empathy is. And it really shines a light on how you treat yourself and how you treat others.
“I would encourage everybody to lean into empathy as much as possible. That doesn’t mean you don’t have boundaries; that doesn’t mean you say ‘yes’ to everything. That means that you harness your ability to see and hear people in ways that you might not have before, because it makes us all better. It allows us to care for each other in ways that become our superpowers.” ↓
Joanna Carpenter is an actor, hospitality consultant, bartender, educator, and activist. You can learn more about her at her website.
Check out her organization, 86 the Barrier—and if you or someone you know could benefit, the program is currently accepting new participants!
And if you’d like more information on how the NYC hospitality industry has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and how we can help, visit Will You Miss Us When We’re Gone? at savenycbars.com.
Thanks for reading. See you next time.
great article Sam and great person, my dear, Joanna!
Thanks, Jonathan! Joanna’s a real gem of a human; I’m lucky to have been able to steal her away from the world for such a great conversation!