Next up was a shot of the gleaming commercial kitchen that forms the heart of our culinary arts program. “We modeled our food-service curriculum on the Culinary Institute of America,” I explained. “The Heinz Corporation contributed most of the equipment and the expertise of some of their executive chefs. Legendary New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme also helped shape the program. You could pay $30,000 for the same training at a private culinary school. Our students get the training for free,” I told them.

“Our graduates are taking good jobs as assistant chefs in fine restaurants all over the city. These are people who came to us thinking a Big Mac was fine dining. But in a matter of months they’re turning out dishes like these. . . .” I called up a slide showing a young African-American woman presenting an elegantly garnished platter of trout amandine, followed by a plate of delicate pastries—fruit rolls, miniature scones—each one scalloped, fluted, or otherwise sculpted into a tiny work of art. “This is the kind of work they do after three months of training,” I said.

“All these are poor people who supposedly have so little to offer, people society has given up on. But if you give them a reason to believe in themselves, if you set the bar high enough and put them in an environment that enables them to perform, you see that they’re capable of producing something as fine as these pastries.”

The last slide I showed them was another shot of the fountain that flows in the courtyard behind our lobby, and in some ways, this is the most telling slide of all. When we were building the place, I insisted we have a fountain. People thought I was crazy. “Why do you need a fountain in a poverty center?” they asked me. And I told them, “Because this isn’t a poverty center, this is a center for success. I want the people who come here to know they deserve success. I start to make that point by letting them know we think they deserve a fountain, and the very fact that a fountain is not, in conventional terms, necessary here makes its presence all the more powerful.”