The Kitchen Table That Fed a Neighborhood

Margaret Alvarez set one extra plate at her kitchen table in 1987. That was all — one plate for a boy named DeShawn who couldn't read past a second-grade level. She prayed a simple prayer: "Lord, just help this child pass his reading test."

DeShawn passed. Then he brought his cousin. The cousin brought a friend. Within six months, Margaret's kitchen held eight children every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, hunched over phonics worksheets between plates of buttered cornbread.

She never asked for more than that kitchen could hold. She never imagined anything beyond those scuffed linoleum floors. But God was doing arithmetic she hadn't learned yet.

By 1994, the Alvarez Literacy Center occupied a donated storefront on Magnolia Avenue. By 2002, it had three full-time staff, a computer lab, and a GED program that had graduated over four hundred adults. DeShawn himself came back with a teaching degree to run the after-school program.