She had not gone home to the Midwest.

She had stayed, with two infants and no money, in the city that had every reason to break her, and she had refused to be broken.

She had gone back to school at night while the boys slept.

She had discovered, in herself, a gift for teaching that poverty had never given her the chance to find.

And somewhere in those years she had looked at the neighborhood around her — full of brilliant children with no resources and no one to believe in them, children exactly as overlooked as she had once been — and instead of merely surviving, she had built something: a foundation that found those children and fed their minds and opened doors for them, the way no door had ever been opened for her.

By the time I saw her name in that program, the Keystone Foundation had placed hundreds of low-income students into schools and scholarships.