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Oral Histories

The SFA oral history program documents life stories from the American South. Collecting these stories, we honor the people whose labor defines the region. If you would like to contribute to SFA’s oral history collections, please send your ideas for oral history along with your CV or Resume and a portfolio of prior oral history work to info@southernfoodways.org.

< Back to Oral History project: COVID-19 Project

ORAL HISTORY

Kristie Abney

Full Plate Real Estate

Kristie Abney is the Managing Partner of Full Plate Real Estate, where she works as a broker to restaurant and food-related retail spaces. She is also the outgoing Board Chair of the board of directors of Wholesome Wave Georgia.

Kristie has more than twenty years of extensive leasing and development experience, and describes her unique approach to support her clients during the COVID-19 pandemic, including highly-personalized problem solving. She shares proactive protective measures including working from home, and discusses how she sees this pandemic impacting the future of food spaces for the long-term, with a focus on ventilation and outdoor flexibility as new priorities.

Date of interview:
2020-12-28

Interviewer:
Diana Dombrowski

Photographer:

Download Transcript Download Transcript 2

“

"I think people know now that, from a restaurant standpoint, that it’s survivable, whatever gets thrown at the restaurant community, they’re going to survive it, and everybody that’s made it this far, the restaurant closures, at least of my clients and the ones in Atlanta that closed, were, in looking back on it, they were ones who already had leases expiring, they were kind of thinking about getting out of the business anyway, their business wasn’t going great even before COVID. You know, they could close and save face and sort of pin it on COVID. Everybody’s that survived will survive the Delta variant. They’ll make it through. I would say everybody feels like it’s survivable, but it’s exhausting and it’s ridiculous that we find ourselves in this spot again." - Kristie Abney

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