On this episode of Five Rules for the Good Life, I sit down with Chris Shepherd and Lindsey Brown, the power duo behind Southern Smoke Foundation, the organization they founded to provide emergency relief and mental health services to food and beverage workers nationwide. Chris and Lindsey share their Five Rules to Prepare for the Unexpected, including their new Crisis Toolkit, a great personal and professional resource to prepare yourself, your team, and your loved ones for scenarios like natural disasters, legal and medical emergencies, and more. If you're in or around Houston this Friday (October 4), make sure to get yourself to their biggest and most delicious fundraiser of the year, Southern Smoke Festival---a delicious day on Discovery Green feat. 85+ chefs and beverage pros from across the country.

This conversation means a lot to me. The culinary community has always been one of the first to show up in times of crisis—feeding, supporting, organizing. But the recovery process is never quick. The heartbreak doesn’t end when the fire is out or the floodwaters recede. It’s long, hard, and often invisible. That’s why organizations like the Southern Smoke Foundation are so essential. They remind us that true support is sustained support. Lindsey and Chris continue to show up—not just with funding or resources, but with empathy, experience, and structure. Their work is an inspiring blueprint for how to care for a community, not just in the moment, but long after the headlines fade.

Photo by Daniel Ortiz

Tickets are on sale now! Mark your calendars for October 4, 2025, as the Southern Smoke Festival presented by Sysco returns to Houston’s Discovery Green. This high-energy event brings together 85+ top chefs, beverage pros, and live music for one unforgettable day. More than a feast, it fuels the Southern Smoke Foundation’s mission to support food and beverage workers in crisis. Come for the flavors, stay for the cause.

Hello, and welcome to Five Rules for the Good Life. I’m your host, Darin Bresnitz.

It is always a pleasure, and today I get to sit down with Lindsey Brown and Chris Shepherd, the Executive Director and the Founding Director and Honorary Chairman, respectively, of the Southern Smoke Foundation. They’re here to share their five rules to help prepare for the unexpected. We talk about this year’s devastating storms in their home state of Texas, how being prepared with checklists and important documents before disaster strikes is the best way to stay safe, and how taking care of your mental health is a key step to survival.

So let’s get into the rules.

Chris and Lindsey, always so good to see you two. Congratulations on the festival that’s coming up right around the corner. Thank you for making the time to sit down with me for the show.

Your home state of Texas was hit with devastating storms and flooding in the Hill Country. I know that the Southern Smoke Foundation was early on the ground to help offer support and guidance during this terrible time. Can you share some of the details of your outreach immediately after the storm?

We have a very focused niche when it comes to supporting natural disasters. There was so much devastation in that region, yet so few of those people that were devastated work in the food and beverage industry. Our Chief Mission Officer actually has family in Kerrville, so she spent a couple of days hitting the pavement, letting them know that we’re here and we’re available and we are accepting applications for assistance. What she found was a lot of hesitation and a lot of distrust. There had already been people down there scamming a lot of these folks.

What we found is that a lot of people are on a business cash basis in that small town. One of the things that we remind people is you need to keep track of payments, you need to keep track of your pay stubs. Unfortunately, as a 501(c)(3), we’re not able to fund people who get paid in cash. To be really honest, it’s been a challenge for us to help anyone in that region for those reasons. There’s a lot of mistrust for people from the outside. A lot of those businesses are cash businesses. And as close as we are, we’re still so far away.

Dealing with the Eaton Canyon fires, it really is a ground game. It just feels like such a tenuous time in these little communities and the culinary industry at large. What have you two seen personally, even closer to home?

What we’re seeing on the emergency relief side is that we’re getting more individual applications, not disaster-related, than we ever have before. That can be a mix of a couple of things. It could be the fact that we have more awareness now than we have before. There’s a lot of crisis out there. There are a lot of people who don’t have a safety net. In addition to the quantity of applications, the grants that we’re giving out are larger than ever. The need is real.

With these increased needs and your desire to support the community, how does Southern Smoke garner enough support and then distribute it accordingly?

You mentioned Southern Smoke Festival, and so these events that we’re doing to fundraise are very important. Festival is still our largest annual fundraiser, and that, plus Decanted—which is our wine auction in the spring—that’s about half of our annual revenue. Everything else comes in through third-party events, fundraisers, corporate partners, individual donors. We’ve staffed up pretty significantly on our programs team. So we have more full-time people working cases. We also have more contract people working cases, and we have it in our business plan to continue to hire next year.

It’s also about going out and doing events. Like this weekend, I’ll be in Greenville for Euphoria, their food festival there, raising awareness for Southern Smoke. And then literally going off to California to do another event to raise more awareness. As much money as we’re raising—or trying to raise—we still need to do more, because we also grow in what people know of us.

Getting that awareness out and helping get people prepared for what life throws at them is really inspiring. That’s why I’m so excited for you to share your five rules to help prepare for the unexpected, which is something my family went through this year when we lost our house to the Eaton Canyon fire.

Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that.

It’s okay. And I appreciate it. The rules we’re going to talk about—I see them, and I feel good because I knew some of them, but not all of them. When you are faced with even having the opportunity to evacuate or to see something coming that you have no control over, it’s easy to scramble. It’s easy to grab things that are personally important, but maybe won’t help you immediately in getting you even just to the next step of getting you back on your feet or in a safe place.

Your rule number one is one of the most important things you can think about when dealing with something unexpected. What’s your first rule?

Have your documents online and know how to access them. We see all the time—people don’t know how to find their paystubs. They don’t know where the copy of their lease is. All of those things they’ll need in a crisis, not just to provide to us, but any other disaster or crisis relief organization is going to ask for those things too. Creating a free Google Drive account and uploading the documents so you can access them from your phone, from any computer, anywhere you are, and just knowing that all of it is there in one place. Hopefully you will never need it—hopefully—but if you do, it’s there and you know how to find it.

Had I known how on our own we were going to be, as far as having those types of documents or even having a plan, I would have prepared even more. Which speaks a lot to your rule number two: have a plan.

Have a plan in the case of a natural disaster. Think about a lot of people that are having a baby—they’ve got their bag packed by the door. It’s another version of that. What do you do if something is headed your way and you have to evacuate? What are you going to have ready? How are you going to get the word out to friends and family or employees if you’re a business owner? Knowing exactly what that plan is, is so important.

Well, it’s funny, because as we say this, I need to do this better.

Everybody does.

Everyone should be prepared.

You touched on this earlier about people being guarded because the scammers have come in. And we’ve seen this as well too, in California, dealing with the fires. What no one really warns you about is that once you survive, once you get out, once you start rebuilding, a lot of people are going to come and try to take advantage of you.

Which brings us to your rule number three: know what your rights are.

One thing we found is that our case managers have really become advocates for our applicants when they’re working those cases. So they’re the ones connecting them with legal aid. They’re the ones connecting them with different organizations, immigration organizations. We’ve sort of built internally—we don’t post it because things change so quickly—but we have an internal Rolodex of different groups that we can recommend our applicants reach out to or connect them to. I mean, so many people that come to us don’t know about disability. There are even people who don’t know about SNAP benefits.

We also partner with other like-minded nonprofits—if we partner with Giving Kitchen or we partner with CORE, we can help that applicant further with all of us working together and providing larger sums. Once you know your rights and once you know what you have access to, it really allows you to plan.

And your fourth rule helps you stay organized—which, Chris, you know, anyone who’s ever stepped into a kitchen does this all the time just to make a meal or service happen. But people rarely do this for the bigger moments in life. What’s your fourth rule?

Have checklists printed. I can definitely speak to Chris—he’ll cook Thanksgiving dinner and he’s got it all written down.

Same. Everything that I’m doing over the next few days is checklist-based. And it’s easy to have it on your phone or it’s easy to have it just in a document or just written down anywhere. Thanksgiving, I have a whiteboard in the kitchen.

The Notes app on your phone is a wonderful thing. There are even checkboxes you can add there. Once I learned how to use that—game changer.

The final part of this puzzle when life comes at you pretty fast is a tricky one. A lot of people who experience the unexpected—what they don’t tell you is that there’s the moment it happens, and then the moment continues on. You’re constantly living in this event because you’re either not back home or your community’s been disrupted. The life that you thought you had or the safety you thought you had isn’t there anymore. You have to find a way to both accept and ride through those emotions.

Which encapsulates your rule number five: you have to take care of your mental health.

So many of these events are so traumatic. You need that support to make it through. Not all crisis is financial. Well, traditionally, when the financial crisis happens, so do other crises. When you start thinking about, “How am I going to do all this?” you can’t do that by yourself. You have to have somebody to talk to.

And you guys offer counseling.

We do. We provide grants with universities that have clinical training programs. In exchange for those grants, we have PhD candidates who provide 20 free sessions for food and beverage workers. We’re an emergency relief organization in 50 states. Our Behind You mental health program is in 12 states and D.C., and we hope to have a 13th state by the end of this year.

We’re slowly growing. We’re doing it strategically. The last thing we want to do is go into a state and have to pull out because of funding. So that’s why it’s really important to us to make sure that the funding is there. Our two newest states are Michigan and Florida. We’re really excited to have them on board.

Chris and Lindsey, thank you so much for continuing your support, throwing the festival—which is happening this year on October 4th—and for providing all these resources for people who both know that they need it and don’t know that they’re going to need it maybe a week or a month or even a year from now.

If people want to donate, or follow along with the events, or just see how they can work with you and donate their time, where can they go?

SouthernSmoke.org.

Thank you so much for sharing our message. It means more than you know.

It’s the least I could do. I really appreciate you two making the time. Good luck with everything. And I hope to see you soon.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

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