RETIREMENT STORIES - Giving Back: The Andrea Craig Story

Giving Back: The Andrea Craig Story

By Lisa Raffo, Editorial Director

Giving back is a major reason for having a Retirement Job.
See: What is a Retirement Job?

Andrea Craig is a woman with a passion. And by combining that passion with her past work experience, she has crafted an exciting new retirement job for herself.

But it didn’t come easily. Moving to a new city and starting out cold in a job search was much harder than she realized. And when she came up against an employer who had reservations about her age, she felt very demoralized and decided to point her job search in a different direction.

Andrea had a 30-year career as a restaurateur in Madison, Wisconsin. She owned and managed several restaurants, the most recent being Kennedy Manor.

Her love of food and cooking began when she traveled to France as a young woman. “I was exposed to some European traditions. And I just fell in love with the French way of treating eating and drinking and carrying on,” she remembers.

An idea that also captured Andrea’s attention was how instrumental local produce was to regional French cooking. That idea migrated to the U.S. around the same time Andrea was beginning her career.

“There was a wave of people in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s – most famously Alice Waters in California – who discovered that one of the key issues for good eating was good regional produce,” Andrea recalls. “This demand for local food started with restaurants and then moved to the general public, stimulating a re-growth in small farms.”

Andrea’s love of delicious meals prepared with local ingredients inspired her to go into the restaurant business at age 30. Although the next 30 years were not always easy, she always loved what she was doing.

In the late 1990’s, when her husband, Bruce, retired from his job as Assistant Attorney General for the State of Wisconsin, he suggest to Andrea that they shake up their lives and their relationship by making a major move. They decided they would enjoy the convenience and excitement of living in a dense, urban area. In the fall of 2000, they packed up and moved to Manhattan.

“When we moved, I knew I’d be giving up my friends. But I didn’t realize how much of my sense of professional self was connected to the past,” Andrea says.

She had no professional network in her new city. But with a couple of contacts through professional organizations she belonged to, she set out to find a job doing apiece of what she had been doing back in Madison – managing a dining room – but this time, on a part-time basis.

She met with a well-known New York restaurateur whom she respected to get some ideas and talk about possible opportunities in his restaurant.

“He told me point blank that hiring somebody my age would change the culture of his workplace,” Andrea explains. “It was the first time that I had thought of myself as having an age. I had always worked with people of varying ages. It had never occurred to me that my presence would alter a workplace. I was hurt.”

Andrea felt she still had the same strong set of skills she’d been using for the past 30 years. But the encounter threw her. “I was stunned. It demoralized me. It affected my confidence,” she says.

She interviewed at other restaurants, but her confidence was so badly shaken, she nearly abandoned her search.

She did end up getting a job running a dining room part time at a Manhattan restaurant, but the experience was not a success. Andrea felt there might be something else out there for her.

“I spent a lot of time reading and writing and joined a couple of academic organizations,” she explains.

She kept returning to her passion for supporting and sustaining local and regional agriculture. And even honed in on a concept she calls “Intentional Institutional Demand,” whereby an organization or institution commits to fashioning its menu around local products, creating a steady, reliable demand for farmers.

As she was contemplating her next move, her former Madison business partner, Nancy Christy, called to ask for feedback on a new idea.

Christy had been approached by an organization dedicated to helping and housing the homeless. The organization wanted to find a way to use its existing kitchen facilities to generate income and teach job skills to its residents.

Andrea’s former partner liked the idea, but also wanted to include employment opportunities for the disabled as part of the project. She had a longstanding commitment to the issue. And past experience convinced her that extending opportunities to the disabled made the work environment more fulfilling and productive for everyone.

Andrea thought it sounded great, but felt one more component needed to be added to the project. “I said, what about my passion?” she remembers.

So she and Christy put their heads together and came up with a proposal. The kitchen would employ homeless people and the disabled to produce 2 or 3 “value-added” products that would help local farmers by using local ingredients. Value-added products are created, as Andrea explains, by “taking raw food products and increasing their value by making them into something, like cheese. It helps local farmers by securing a reliable buyer and the products can be simple – yogurt, is an example, or high-end, such as an aged farmhouse cheese.”

“A lot of work for the homeless and disabled has been make-work,” says Andrea. “Creating highly desirable products from local food would not only benefit the farmers; it would also have the benefit of engaging the homeless and disabled in helping to solve a community problem, not be one.”

They pitched the idea to the homeless facility and got the green light. A Madison philanthropist funded a feasibility study. And recently, the Madison Community Foundation awarded a grant to fund the creation of the business plan.

Andrea feels that while this is a big change for her – it’s not jumping into something completely new. “It’s seamless in way,” she reflects. “I miss the restaurant business terribly, but mentally it’s the same rich connections to me… doing something you care about so much that the aggravations kind of drop away.”

And how is she balancing this new work with time for her home and family? She agreed that when she and her husband moved to New York, she would only work half time. It took some getting used to. “I’m not nearly as powerful, but I can be kinder, nicer, less self-absorbed,” she says.

Her husband works half time, too, doing pro-bono work for a community legal organization in New York. “I think it’s helpful that one of us works outside the home,” Andrea explains. She said that when she and her husband first moved to New York, they were both home full-time. Now, with a little time apart, their time together is more fulfilling.

But she still hasn’t fully embraced a new hobby or leisure activity. “When I first knew I was going to retire, Andrea laughs, “the first thing I wanted to do was learn to play pool. I went out and bought a book… but I haven’t read a word or picked up a cue stick. The attraction of it was when I had no time to play.”

And when asked whether she feels she brings a different perspective to her work than she did 30 years ago, she pauses for a minute and says that when she was working at her career full out and full time, it was harder to see the big picture. She found herself completely immersed in the day-to-day and moment-to-moment details of her restaurants.

“Now I can go into something deeply if I choose. It’s a luxury,” she reflects.

Andrea’s passion still fuels her work now as much, if not more, than it did from the very beginning. She hopes to work on this and other projects she is developing for the next few years at least. “I wasn’t ready to not contribute. I felt like I should be still out there,” she explains. “We’re all in this together and there’s a lot that needs to be done.”