When Care Becomes a Model: How Thrive Restaurant Group Is Reimagining Workforce Support

This Second Chance Month, Café Momentum is proud to recognize Thrive Restaurant Group as a supporting partner — and to share the story of how one visit to Dallas sparked something bigger.

At Café Momentum, we don’t count chances. For many of the young people we serve, this is their first — a first job, a first mentor, a first real system of support. That’s the spirit behind Second Chance Month: not a celebration of redemption arcs, but a commitment to building the kind of access and opportunity that should have been there all along.

It’s a spirit Matt Burchett, Ph.D., Senior Vice President of Strategy and Social Impact at Thrive Restaurant Group, recognized immediately when he walked into Café Momentum Dallas in spring 2024.

The Gap Was Hiding in Plain Sight

Burchett had traveled to Dallas with a group of nonprofit leaders from Wichita. He wasn’t expecting to leave with a blueprint. But the visit made something clear: the most effective way to support people navigating vulnerable circumstances isn’t through referrals or resource lists. It’s proximity.

“Providing information about or sharing community resources was often insufficient,” Burchett said, “particularly for those whose ability to navigate the systems was limited.”

He returned to Wichita with a question: Could a for-profit restaurant group build something that honored the spirit of Café Momentum — and still scale?

Thrive Restaurant Group had been in the business of caring for its team members for more than 50 years. But Burchett and his colleagues were seeing a pattern. Employees from vulnerable backgrounds were encountering everyday challenges — a car breaking down, an unexpected bill, childcare falling through — and those challenges were quietly affecting their ability to show up and stay.

The insight that reframed everything came from Café Momentum Founder and CEO Chad Houser: people in crisis often run out of relationships before they run out of resources. What Thrive’s team members needed wasn’t more information. They needed someone in their corner.

Building the Success Coach Model

Thrive partnered with Goodwill to create an embedded Success Coach role — a dedicated position inside their restaurants designed to help team members navigate existing systems and solve the kinds of everyday problems that can derail employment before it ever gets traction.

The partnership did more than fill a staffing gap. It opened a pipeline. By connecting with nonprofits serving people experiencing homelessness, involvement in the justice system, IDD and foster care, Thrive began intentionally recruiting from populations that often get passed over — and inviting them into a support system built to help them stay.

“Together is better,” Burchett said. “Our general managers have a deep care and heart for the people, but there are limitations to what they can provide outside of the work environment. The Success Coach helps us address that need.”

The Results

When Thrive launched the program, the team projected that roughly 10% of their 300 local employees would participate. After year one, that number exceeded 25%.

Employees have used the program to open savings accounts, obtain driver’s licenses, secure housing after unexpected homelessness, navigate work visas and enroll in college. The breadth of impact, Burchett said, has surpassed every expectation.

And the business case has held. Thrive’s bet was that intentional care doesn’t have to be expensive — that high retention could offset the real costs of hiring and training. That hypothesis has proven out, and Burchett believes the model is transferable well beyond hospitality, into manufacturing, construction and any hourly wage industry.

A Model Worth Spreading

For Burchett, Café Momentum remains the standard.

“Café Momentum is the gold standard for how to support a vulnerable population,” he said. “It moves our community from challenging moments in life to human flourishing and thriving.”

Thrive’s adaptation is one vision of what it looks like when that standard travels — when the belief that people deserve proximity, relationship and real support gets built into the fabric of a business. Not as a program. As a culture.

This Second Chance Month, Thrive Restaurant Group’s support helps make that work possible. We’re grateful for partners who don’t just believe in second chances — but build systems to make them real.

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