I learned to play chess at a folding table in Washington, D.C., across from a college student who surely had somewhere better to be, and chose to sit with me instead.
I didn’t grow up with much. What my family had, in large part, was Martha’s Table — an after-school program that fed us, watched over us, and, without ever making a show of it, decided that our futures were worth investing in. My siblings went. My cousins went. After the last bell, it was simply where we belonged. Volunteers came from Howard and from all over the city. They sat with us over our homework, drove us on field trips to parts of the country we’d only seen on television, and taught us things that had nothing to do with any test — how to carry ourselves, how to think a few moves ahead, how to lose a game of chess and quietly set the board up again.
I’ve spent a long time since then trying to understand what actually happened in that room. And I’ve arrived at a conclusion I would stake my name on:
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not.
The children I grew up with were not short on ability. What some of them were short on was a door — a person who showed up, an hour of attention, a piece of information no one in their house happened to have, a glimpse of a life they hadn’t yet been given permission to imagine. That’s what Martha’s Table was. Not charity in the thin sense of the word. A door, held open, by people who never asked for the credit.
It is fashionable to talk about poverty as though it were a verdict on character. It isn’t. Poverty is a set of missing doors. And the thing about a door is that it can be opened — deliberately, one at a time, by anyone willing to stand there and hold it.
That belief is the whole of my work now. I’ve spent my life building — ventures, yes, but also songs and pages and a stubborn conviction that the tools of enterprise are among the most powerful instruments we have for good, when we aim them at the people the world overlooks. Everything I care about — education, financial literacy, opportunity — traces back to that folding table.
I’m not finished. One day I intend to build a place like Martha’s Table of my own, here in the States, and a school somewhere in Africa — to hand another child the door that was once held open for me. If I’m given the years to do it, that is the work I want to be remembered for.
I never learned the names of most of the people who tutored me those afternoons. I never got to thank them. So I’ve decided to spend my life being, for someone else, what those strangers were for me.
— Michael