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Second chances hard to give, but worth it
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Published: April 7, 2008
Second chances are hard to come by these days. It seems that we're a little less forgiving, whether of politicians, bosses or employees, or even family and friends. If someone screws up, blows it or lets us down, we don't seem very willing to let things go.
Maybe it's always been this way, because people have certainly been messing up as long as we've been around as a species (look at what Adam and Eve did in that garden). But there seems to be a lack of forgiveness in contemporary society that wasn't quite as pointed when more people were worried about the state of their immortal souls, and a little less about their checkbooks.
This came to mind when I attended a "second chance" event the other week. I serve on the board of the Second Harvest Food Bank, a very worthy charity that does the irreplaceable work of trying to feed hungry people. I was assigned to help with a 16-month-old program the Kate B. Reynolds Poor and Needy trust initially financed called the Triad Community Kitchen, which recently graduated its sixth class of trained food workers.
So where does the second chance come in? It takes the form of the opportunity afforded the 75 graduates of this school, which is held in a special kitchen inside the cavernous warehouses of the Food Bank. Just about every one of the 15 men and women gathered in their white chef's jackets and toque hats that graduation day had been at one time or another alcoholics, drug addicts, homeless, chronically unemployed, abuse survivors or people just plain down on their luck.
No one knows this story better than Chef Jeff Bacon, who runs the Community Kitchen, teaches the students and helps them make the hot food that's supplied to soup kitchens all around Northwest North Carolina. He was a cocaine addict, spent some time in jail 15 years ago, and pretty much hit rock bottom in his personal and professional lives.
With some divine inspiration and people who were willing to give him a break in his climb up out of the gutter, Jeff came up with an idea. He thought of a way to help people just like him, who had nowhere else to go with their bottomed-out lives: Give them a second chance, only do it in the ever-growing food preparation business. He started a pilot program in Greensboro, then hooked up with the Second Harvest Food Bank, which got him grant money and gave his program a home.
Whether for grocery stores, restaurants and catering businesses, or for schools, hospitals and factories, there is a great demand for trained and skilled food-preparation workers, the folks who peel and dice the tomatoes, make the stock for the soup, cut up the chicken for the chicken salad, and the fruit for the fruit salad. There are health regulations and professional standards and proper technique, and they all have to be learned and practiced over and over again.
The graduates whose commencement I attended were all races and ages, all heights and weights. But they shared more than radiant faces and crisp white outfits: They were surrounded by friends and family and previous graduates of the Community Kitchen program. These were all people who were rooting for this second chance to work, for these people's lives to finally fall into place and have a purpose, for them to get a job that helps define who they are, rather than who they were.
I sat next to a man named Bobby Albright, who had just been stunned by winning the first award they were giving to an alumnus of the program. He was presented with a silver serving platter that had a little engraved tag with his name on it. He sat silently, just staring at it, until a tear started to run down his cheek. "I never had nothing like this with my name on it," he said, when I struck up a conversation.
Bobby told me he had just been laid off from a restaurant, where business was down. But he added that he knew he had a skill-set now, along with real kitchen experience, that would land him a new job soon. "This place gave me a second chance," he said, gesturing toward Chef Jeff and the Community Kitchen Classroom. "No one ever did that for me."
Yes, second chances are rare occurrences. But when they do happen, as they did for 15 people a few weeks ago and another 15 who are in the current, seventh, class of the Triad Community Kitchen, they can result in a diploma, a fancy hat and a new pair of chef's knives. And for someone like Bobby Albright, all the difference in the world.
■ Dale Pollock, a former dean of the School of Filmmaking at the N.C. School of the Arts, teaches film there now.
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