By Dakota Antelman, Contributing Writer
Hudson – This Father’s Day, June 18, the Rail Trail Flatbread Company will host a special buffet style brunch to raise money for the Hudson Boys and Girls Club. The event, entitled Flapjacks and Flatbreads, is the first such fundraiser from the company’s Community Outreach team, which formed late last year.
The buffet-style event will feature breakfast-themed flatbreads along with traditional breakfast foods. It will be open from 8:30 – 11 a.m. on June 18. Rail Trail is selling enough tickets to fill their seating area once and will donate the proceeds from those ticket sales to the Boys and Girls Club.
The Community Outreach team that organized this event seeks to give back to Hudson and to thank it for welcoming Rail Trail in its infancy. Its members also seek to thank the town for continuing to support Rail Trail as it had expanded.
“There’s always been a feeling of gratitude within Rail Trail for giving us such an accepting place to get started up and then encouraging us to grow and expand outward and help set up New City [Microcreamery] and Less Than Greater Than and whatnot,” said Jake Doherty Munro, a Rail Trail employee who has worked to help put the Father’s Day fundraiser together. “It definitely came partially from that.”
Beginning last year, Rail Trail’s management team adopted a philosophy of “open book management” allowing employees throughout the company to have knowledge of its finances. In tandem with the move to open book management, Rail Trail brought in educators from the group Rethink Restaurants to teach a business and finance class to its employees.
As the class neared its end last fall, employees formed teams that focused on aspects of Rail Trail’s operations. The Community Outreach team, which now includes close to a dozen employees working on the Flapjacks and Flatbreads fundraiser, is one of those teams.
“There’s a lot of different age ranges here and a lot of different positions in the restaurant,” Doherty Munroe said of the team’s structure. “That is good because we wanted diversity of ideas and opinions on how we should run things.”
The idea for the Father’s Day fundraiser itself came shortly after the team first convened. Hunter Panneton, another employee and team member, remembers one of the waitresses on the team proposed the idea as a possible charity event during the holiday season. While the team did not organize the event in time for the holidays, it has been working on it ever since.
Crucial in this process was the selection of the Boys and Girls Club as the group to receive the money Rail Trail raises.
“We settled on the Boys and Girls Club because, honestly, the service they provide for mothers or people who work late nights, single parents, or even just parents who are really busy, is invaluable,” Doherty Munro said. “You can trust the people working there and you can have your child go there and you don’t need to worry about them. We just think it’s a very important service that they do.”
With the fundraiser now just days away, the team will be watching the turnout for the event carefully. They are eager to both see how Hudson responds to this form of charity and build their future work around the feedback they receive on June 18.
“We’re just trying to see if it’s something that the community will enjoy,” said Panneton. “If it’s something that people will want to be in, then great, we’ll make it annual. If it’s not very popular, then we’ll try to think of something else. Right now, it’s just an idea that someone had. We just got the ball rolling and we’re just going to see where it goes from here.”
Tickets are on sale inside Rail Trail in Hudson or online through the following link: www.eventbrite.com/e/fathers-day-flapjacks-and-flatbreads-brunch-for-a-cause-tickets-34777511473.
Rail Trail is located at 33 Main St., Hudson.