Chapter 21 - The Charity VisitSix months later, as part of my work with Sterling Global’s philanthropic arm, I visited a women’s vocational training center in upstate New York. The center was funded entirely by our foundation, providing free education in coding, data analysis, and business management to women escaping domestic abuse and financial exploitation.
As I walked through the bright, modern computer lab, watching twenty women intently working on dual-monitor setups, the program director walked beside me.
“We have an eighty-five percent job placement rate within six months of graduation,” she explained proudly. “Most of these women were told by their families or partners that they were useless, that they lacked intelligence, that they could never survive on their own.”
I stopped at a desk where a young woman in her early twenties was debugging a complex Python script. Her eyes were red with fatigue, but her jaw was set in determination.
“I know that look,” I said softly to the director.
“Which look?”
“The look of someone who has realized that the people who called her weak were just afraid of what would happen when she discovered her own strength.”
I walked over to the young woman’s desk, pulled up a chair, and sat beside her. “Need a hand with that recursive loop?”
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She looked up, surprised to see the founder of the company sitting next to her. “I... I keep getting a index error on line forty-two.”
I smiled, taking a pencil from her desk. “Let me show you a trick I learned when I was building my first system.”
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