A Hand Up In a D.C. System Full of Letdowns

A Record of Success

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On that first day, chef Karen Lewis, a no-nonsense boss, ordered everyone to put on plastic aprons and hairnets. She put Sims on an assembly line that was making a stew. He pulled one softball-size onion after another out of a 50-pound bag, chopped off each end and pulled off the papery outer skin. Three other students fumbled around, peeling and chopping carrots the size of a chair leg and chattering. Sims, who had worked in a restaurant before, methodically made his way through the onions, not saying anything.

"That's right, Mr. Sims, keep doin' what you're doin,' " Lewis said. Sims just nodded.

The kitchen was founded by Robert Egger, a loquacious former nightclub manager who figured that all the extra food commercial kitchens in Washington end up throwing away could be put to use feeding the city's hungry. His other idea: You could have people training to get jobs do the preparation. In 2004, 78 people entered the program and 56 graduated.

Over the past seven years, 91 percent of its graduates have gotten a job on graduation, and 74 percent of graduates held a job six months later. Some 98 percent pass an exam to be a certified food handler, a crucial certification in the industry. The group, funded mostly by private donations, spends $7,000 for every trainee who gets a job, less than half the rate of spending per successful trainee of organizations under contract with the city's Department of Employment Services.

The average age of the trainees in Class No. 59 was in the forties, and some of them once had the stable lives that came with steady work. Remona Jackson used to have a comfortable apartment in Prince George's County and a job screening bags at Reagan National Airport. Then the company she worked for lost the contract following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Jackson struggled to find a job, eventually running through her savings and ending up living in the homeless shelter upstairs from the kitchen. "It took me two months to get used to eating dinner at 4:30," she said.

Sylvia Brown, a talkative former secretary at the University of Maryland, was laid off after state budget cuts and then fell on hard times.

Others had more troubled pasts: the former skilled laborer who was in drug treatment, the ex-gang member in a halfway house, and the former high school football player who had five children and had only recently finished a jail sentence for selling heroin in a school zone.

They showed up at 8:30 a.m., Monday through Friday. After roll call, the trainees joined paid staff and volunteers in making 4,000 meals to be delivered to homeless shelters and halfway houses, including some of the very places where the trainees lived.

The trainees ate lunch together each day in their cramped classroom next to the kitchen. For the first few weeks, they ate in near silence. That changed soon enough.

"Oh, man, I'm hungry," said one of the trainees one Wednesday in February, three weeks into the class, as he sat down with a plate of a noodle casserole his fellow trainees had made. "Man, Sylvia, y'all did good with this."

"It's all about the seasoning," said Brown, beaming with pride. "Some thyme. A little parsley."

"Mmm-hmm," grunted Sims, between mouthfuls.