Q&A: Ikimi Dubose-Woodson of The Roots Fund

Few drinks professionals are as committed to real, tangible change as Ikimi Dubose-Woodson. In 2020, she co-founded The Roots Fund, a nonprofit devoted to empowering underrepresented communities in wine, with fellow industry leaders Tahiirah Habibi and Carlton McCoy, Jr. The organization has since worked with nearly 250 aspiring and ambitious hospitality professionals, says Dubose-Woodson, who serves as CEO. “These are people whose lives we’ve changed, whether we’ve relocated them, helped them get their dream career going, got them the education they’ve been waiting on to get that promotion.” Last year, The Roots Fund expanded its mission to include spirits, creating a scholarship fund with Wine & Spirits Education Trust (WSET). Imbibe caught up with Dubose-Woodson to talk about her 360-degree view of hospitality, how she navigates shifting attitudes toward (and investments in) DEI initiatives, and more.

Imbibe: It’s been more than four years since you, Carlton McCoy, Jr., and Tahiirah Habibi created The Roots Fund. What are some of the successes you’re most proud of?

Ikimi Dubose-Woodson: The first thing that comes to mind is the amount of people we put through the program. The impact has been so layered, especially with the mental health services [we provide]. This is so much bigger than wine or spirits. Also, we’re growing Rooted in France [the Roots Fund’s scholarship program in partnership with the Burgundy School of Wine & Spirits Business in France]. We started it out with only HBCUs, and it’s now opened up to any college graduates with a bachelor’s degree. That program is continuing to grow, and building a bridge across the pond.

Why is that international access important for aspiring drinks professionals?

If you think about fine wine and spirits, you have to think outside of the U.S. Those who really excel in our business have had access all around the world. If you’re going to be in distribution or importing or sales here, and you’re selling French wine and you’ve never been to France, there can be a bit of a disconnect. With Rooted, we ensure that there is no disconnect. If you’re working for a French importer, we make sure that you have all the tools you need to understand French wine, and you’ve maybe spent some time in the region where the producers are.

The Roots Fund recently expanded to offer spirits education. What can you tell us about the scholarship with WSET?

The program is the first of its kind. We partnered directly with WSET in London, and it will take our scholars through Level 1 and then Level 2 of spirits classes, with a lot of immersive and experiential programming, tastings, and things of that nature. A lot of the people in the program have been working in the front of the house as bartenders or mixologists and aspire to be beverage directors. They’re people who’ve been working in the business and just sort of learned how to make cocktails on the go. Now they’re saying, “I want to be certified,” or “I really want to understand the layers of spirits and cocktails.” We’re hoping that it sparks some interest in them to go all the way up to Level 3 to pursue sake, to pursue beer.

We’re using them as a test pilot because we have another scholarship in the works with Kent Hospitality Group that’s honoring chef Jamal [James] Kent from Saga. It will be solely focused on restaurant workers, so you can only apply for that if you’re working in a hospitality service position. These front-of-house people are so important, and these are people who have really been forgotten. We want to say to them, “Hey, we can support you.”

Are certifications important for people who work in drinks?

For us, certifications are truly about what people want. It’s not that we subscribe to a narrative where you have to be a [WSET] diploma candidate to be a wine director. I know a lot of great people in wine who are bad at taking tests. Does that mean they’re bad at being a sommelier? No. That just means they’re bad at taking tests. They may be more knowledgeable than someone that has that diploma.

We are focused on asking, “What do you think you need to excel and what knowledge do you feel that you’re missing?” Our career development person tracks what the industry is asking for. So, if we see a bunch of fine dining positions for wine directors and saying you need to be up to [WSET] Level 3, we may check in with our scholars to say, “Hey, is there a program at work where you can get this certification? What will this do to level up your career?”

We do every cert, from WSET to CMS to Wine Scholars Guild to Wine Folly. There’s no one perfect set that works for everyone. We offer all of them so people can figure out what is going to grow their careers. We do college tuition, too—Cornell, Davis, Sonoma, Washington State, Napa Valley College. It really just speaks to the impact that we’ll leave on the industry for a very long time.

The mental health services that The Roots Fund provides are groundbreaking. Tell us about why you made that part of your programming.

Everyone on the board has worked in hospitality or service in some way. And we were thinking about the long hours, constantly feeling undervalued, and not being acknowledged. It’s really draining. Some environments are verbally abusive, and you put up with it because you know that it looks good on your resume that you worked at this place for a certain amount of time. With all of that, and then you top it off with the pandemic, and you look at the high rates of suicide in this industry, well, to me, you need to give people space and tools for their mental health.

As a board, we’ve thought of every obstacle someone might come up against. I’m not just giving you a scholarship to WSET and saying, “Have a nice life.” It’s more, “How are you handling the fact that you’re working two jobs—you’re full time at a fine-dining restaurant and part time at a bar on the weekends to keep money coming in, all while fighting for your dream? How are you mentally keeping yourself together?”

We connect scholars with mental health professionals that reflect the communities they serve. A lot of scholars say, “I just want one or two sessions, I don’t think I really need therapy.” Then it turns into three or four months. And after those three or four months, maybe something they’ve been dealing with at work—how to manage their relationship with their boss or how to manage their work-life balance—something has been relieved. They come into their own realizations about themselves, that there was a barrier that has gone away. Now, they’re focusing on their career and what’s next for them in this industry. It’s a key component of what we do.

When you created The Roots Fund in 2020, it was during a time when a lot of U.S. organizations and individuals were reckoning with racial inequities. In the last year, some of these same companies have walked back their DEI pledges and funding, or eliminated them altogether. How would you describe the current landscape?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are very important words. But I remind people all the time that I’m talking to real people every day. I’m not just going to group them into three letters. We support a diverse group of people, we believe inclusion is important, and we want people to have equity and ownership, but we’re not a DEI program. We’re serving human beings.

We all see in plain sight that people have walked back their initiatives. They’ve gone back to saying, “It’s okay to not like people and to scream it loudly.” Which we know is not the right thing to do. Dropping these initiatives is going to cause the public to look at companies and say, “Is this someplace I want to shop at? Is this someplace I want to eat at? Is this someone I want to support, because they don’t think it’s important to support everyone?”

All eyes are on the people who put up whole-page spreads on their websites, or had DEI departments that have been completely dismantled. Hospitality is one of the most diverse workforces in this country. It’s going to delay somethings, but, for The Roots Fund, I also think it’s going to cause us to be more creative and more innovative in our approach. We’re going to continue our work.