Philanthropy tops the menu for NH hospitality company

Common Man Owner and Founder Alex Ray, center, works with fellow Rotarians from a Polish Rotary Club to deliver supplies to an orphanage in Lviv, Ukraine, during his trip to the region in May. (Courtesy photo)

It’s not uncommon for a business to engage in some level of philanthropy as a way to give back to the community.

The Common Man Family of Restaurants in New Hampshire has raised the bar on giving back, especially with its most current relief effort in Ukraine.

At the end of August, the Common Man-led New Hampshire Relief for Ukraine fund had raised $600,000, with a goal of $1 million — and probably more — in sight.

“The war continues to rage in Ukraine, and we need your help to keep the important work going to support the people so deeply affected by this crisis,” said Common Man Owner and Founder Alex Ray. “We are touched by the donations from New Hampshire citizens and businesses that recognize the critical importance of this humanitarian aid.”

Though he prefers to credit his Common Man restaurants and others for their humanitarian efforts, past and current, it is Ray who is at their heart.

Giving a helping hand has essentially been Common Man’s brand since day one, invested right there in the name.

“I want it to be for everybody,” Ray said, recalling how the name Common Man came to be when he opened the first restaurant in Ashland in 1971.

“Somehow I thought of farmers and salt of the earth,” he added. “A man with a plow — that’s where the logo came from because farmers are hardworking, honest people. I want the grease monkey to come here and the bank president.”

In fact, it was a farmer who first received the help of the Common Man.

Within a year of his opening, according to Ray, a farmer flipped his tractor and broke his back. “So we had a day for that man, a spaghetti dinner, and all the money — 100 percent — went to his family,” he said.

‘Tireless philanthropic work’

Since that initial restaurant in Ashland, Common Man has opened seven Common Man restaurants — in Lincoln, Concord, Claremont, Merrimack and Windham — as well as Common Man Roadside eateries in Hooksett, Plymouth and Manchester. The independent hospitality family also includes diners, other restaurants, two inns, a spa, company store, a movie house and performance center, and a wedding and event center.

Over the years, this wide family has been involved in one way or another in the communities they serve.

Their brand is their community service, embedded in Ray, who is described this way on the company website: “Alex Ray is the owner and founder of The Common Man Family of Restaurants, and is known just as much for his family-style restaurants across New Hampshire as he is for his tireless philanthropic work in communities across the state.”

That perspective, according to Ray, serves several purposes.

“It’s branding, but it’s not selfish marketing,” he said. Staff sees their particular restaurant reach out to help their community.

“That makes the staff like their job, and if they’re happy people, then the customers are happy,” he said.

The restaurants themselves are known for their home feel, their comfort and their comfort food.

“We’ve made our path by customers liking us for other reasons” besides the food, Ray added.

The company’s head count currently stands at about 850, according to Ray. It was as high as 1,200 at one time, but was hit hard, as other restaurant companies were, by the pandemic, with his employee numbers dropping by about half.

The aid efforts on behalf of the community are as local as a spaghetti dinner benefit for a varsity hockey team or Pedaling 4 Payson fundraiser spearheaded each year by Concord Hospital on behalf of community members battling cancer or the free dinners on Christmas Day.

The personal efforts can go national — as was the case with a devastating tornado that ripped through Ashland, Kentucky, in 2022, or to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017 as well as the Gulf Coast after the disaster triggered by Hurricane Katrina.

And they can go international. There was the personal visit to Abaco, a group of islands in the northern Bahamas, hit hard by the devastating Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and another to Haiti in 2010 following an earthquake that decimated the nation.

Alex Ray holding the Business of the Year Pinnacle Award he was awarded in 2020 by the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce. (Courtesy photo)

In all of the cases, Ray made personal visits, sometimes multiple times, to the areas.

He has worked with, among others, José Andrés, restaurateur and founder of World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit organization that specializes in leveraging the restaurant industry in order to feed people in disasters.

New Hampshire Relief for Ukraine Fund

Most recently, he said he was first moved to do what he could for Ukraine by the sheer callousness of Russia’s attack.

“This is painful. There’s no reason for a pigheaded guy killing people,” he said. “That’s the angry part of me.”

The effort to help started in May as Ray and others ventured to Poland and into Ukraine.

He traveled with members of Rotary International, a humanitarian service organization that brings together business and professional leaders locally, nationally and internationally.

They visited Warsaw and Zamosc, Poland, and they crossed the border and traveled to Lviv, Ukraine, where they met Ukrainian Rotarians as they delivered food supplies to an orphanage and visited refugee centers. The group visited a convention center that was converted into a shelter, a Soviet-era military barracks converted into a refugee center, a proposed children’s day care and trauma counseling center, and a warehouse coordinating emergency food deliveries into eastern Ukraine.

“We went there for recon to find out what we could do,” he said, adding they came home with a list of ideas on how his Common Man family might be able to help. Included in that list is a bloodmobile that is a combination mobile blood center to not only take contributions of blood but also help deliver blood to war-torn regions. Other ideas on the list were the creation of a trauma counseling center for Ukrainian refugee children in Poland, and an orphanage/safe housing for children in Ukraine.

The effort by the Common Man Family grew into a statewide New Hampshire Relief for Ukraine Fund with additional partners including former New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, WMUR-TV, iHeart Media, Granite United Way, the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, and the Rotary Clubs of Plymouth, NH, and Warsaw, Poland.

Donations to NH Relief for Ukraine can be made online via the fund’s fiscal agent Granite United Way at www.graniteuw.org or by texting NH4UKRAINE to 41444. Checks made out to Granite United Way with NH Relief for Ukraine in the memo line can be mailed to: Granite United Way, 22 Concord St., Manchester, NH 03101. Information about efforts and a donation link can also be found at www.cman4ukraine.org

Common Man is committed to matching donations dollar for dollar, with a goal of $1 million, ultimately sending $2 million combined for Ukraine relief. “We’ll go over it. I think we’re going to go over the million, which is really cool. So you’re gonna get two million for sure,” he said.