Dan Rhoton’s Big, Audacious Plan to End Poverty

Dan Rhoton (right) and Hopeworks trainees at the nonprofit’s Kensington office / Photograph by Gene Smirnov

A dozen years ago, Dan Rhoton was walking down a street in North Philly when he heard someone calling: “Mr. Rhoton! Mr. Rhoton!”

He turned and saw Marcus, a student who’d graduated a year before from St. Gabriel’s Hall, a juvenile detention facility in Audubon where Rhoton had taught math for 15 years. Rhoton describes himself as looking like “a wimpy version of Harry Potter, with a squeaky voice,” but he’d connected with Marcus and his other challenging students. Now Marcus left a group of guys on a corner and came running up to say hello. Suddenly, the victory of seeing him finish high school seemed utterly hollow: A kid who’d done everything Rhoton had demanded of him, Marcus hadn’t found a job after graduating. He was a teenager with a rap sheet, and he was back on the streets — back, Rhoton saw immediately, to selling drugs in North Philly.

Which started Rhoton on something of a trek. First, he went back to St. Gabriel’s that day, a Saturday, and started pulling files on other recent graduates, calling them, messaging them on Facebook, digging into what they were up to now. Rhoton quickly discovered that there were a lot of Marcuses out there, that an alarming number of them were also jobless and getting into trouble once again.

“We had not lived up to our promise to them,” Rhoton realized, which he found devastating, how the promise of a diploma was often worthless to young adults who had a record. He thought he was transforming lives, and he was deeply satisfied with that role. Instead, “I was selling bad, bad stuff. And that put me in a dark spot.”

Soon Rhoton left St. Gabriel’s, talking his way into a job at Hopeworks in North Camden, a tiny, three-person nonprofit sponsored by three churches that trained a handful of high school dropouts how to code.

A specific job skill. Good! It was a nuts-and-bolts start, something Rhoton, despite having no background in coding himself, could latch on to. But it didn’t take Hopeworks students very far. “What we see in Philly and Camden is not that the problem is just getting a job,” Rhoton says. “There’s this endemic poverty where folks are stuck in it for generations.”

Job training wasn’t enough, given that graduates usually weren’t even getting jobs — and if they did, they often couldn’t keep them. But two breakthroughs on what his young charges needed beyond coding skills — or, really, with training like that — were coming for Rhoton and Hopeworks. And the more he learned, and the deeper he got into the problem, the larger his goals became.

Rhoton now says he wants to end poverty in Philadelphia, and he doesn’t seem to spend any time worrying about how absurdly bold that goal may sound. He believes he’s been building a program that can do just that.

Breakthrough number one: Hopeworks would have to not only train everyone who walked through the door in computer skills, but employ them as well. Literally employ them. Rhoton, who was soon running Hopeworks, developed businesses within the organization to do just that — building websites for companies, digital mapping, and, more recently, medical billing and coding. (This year those businesses will gross a combined $1.3 million; the balance of the organization’s annual $5 million in expenses is covered by philanthropists, private foundations, private donors, and corporate partners such as Comcast and Dell.) The businesses lay the groundwork for future employment, providing a yearlong on-ramp to the working world through training and in-house jobs. His charges need that time.

Admission to Hopeworks is open to anyone between 17 and 26. It has facilities in Kensington, which Rhoton opened three years ago, and Camden, employing 43 full-time staffers. Students are paid a $30 daily stipend while they learn tech skills, with bonuses of $75 and $150 when milestones are hit. In Kensington, Hopeworks just expanded to 10,000 square feet to handle 114 folks training or working in one of its businesses. There’s a waiting list there of 265, and Rhoton sometimes finds himself needing to take meetings — as he did in the beginning in Camden — from his car.

The training followed by a Hopeworks job is a way to change the narratives of lives, and to develop what Rhoton calls “soft skills.” Therein lies breakthrough number two: Trainees need help understanding what they’re capable of and how to get there. Many have the desire to make themselves attractive to employers but no road map on how to do it. The guidance is hands-on, and this piece, trauma-informed therapy, Rhoton learned about during his 15 years at St. Gabriel’s, where he’d seen the same behavior and hardships so many Hopeworks trainees are stuck with. New students often don’t show up for training, so within 30 minutes they get a call or text from Hopeworks: Where are you? Thirty percent (yes, 30 percent) will lose housing during their year of training, so Hopeworks has a pipeline to shelters and more permanent housing.

Help in reshaping lives at Hopeworks drills deep. It starts every morning when students walk through the door, in Camden and in Kensington, with a checklist on emotions: Are you feeling excited, anxious, angry, lonely, joyful, disorganized, proud? And most important: What is your dream? There’s a food cupboard and a clothes closet for anyone needing to upgrade to work attire. Referrals to therapists are offered, and throughout the course of any day, problems pop up: It can be seemingly nothing, one trainee asking another for an opinion about his hair, and when it’s given, the guy who asked feeling disrespected, which means a side conference with staff to talk it out.

And there are serious problems: A young woman who came to Hopeworks a few years ago had been sex trafficked, and any time a male instructor came close to her to point out something — say, as she worked at a computer — she would get triggered and react as if she were in real danger. The solution was to give her a way to ask for some space — literal space — so she could calm herself down. This is what Rhoton calls her safety plan, something along the lines of Thanks for your help — could you step back a little bit? I’m not comfortable with folks so close to me. It gave her a moment to breathe and regroup. To Rhoton, the bottom line is straightforward: As his charges work on past trauma, on finding stability, it’s paramount that they are able to take care of themselves first. And that means not only getting a decent job, but keeping it.

This is, by its nature, slow work, but Hopeworks is ramping up, pushing toward 700 job placements a year over the next five years; that’s the tipping point, Rhoton says, to take this program to other cities. The numbers are strong on the model’s efficacy. Employers are getting on board, Rhoton says, after exposure to trainees when they use one of Hopeworks’s businesses or in volunteering at the organization. From there, word of mouth is building locally. Got some tough-to-fill positions at your company? Try Hopeworks. Rhoton says that a key marker is staying employed in a job post-Hopeworks for at least a year, which portends staying employed generally and not sliding backward. The one-year job retention rate for those who go through the program is a remarkable 92 percent, with an average starting salary of $46,000.

In Kensington, there’s a main room about the size of a basketball court. About a dozen students sit at long tables working at computers, and my intern guides (“intern” is the Hopeworks term for students who have graduated into working for one of its companies) talk about the atmosphere here as if something fundamental changed for them the moment they first walked in. It doesn’t seem like they’re trying to convince me of something so much as sharing the best group dynamic there could be, and I can feel it too — there’s a warmth and an ease here. As one intern tells me, in words so simple and unblinking they seem profound: “We care about each other.”

Rhoton, who sets the tone, still looks like Harry Potter, even at 48, divorced, with twin 16-year-old daughters, which means he looks … soft. But that belies his own background; in fact, he has more in common with his Hopeworks students than they can imagine. Rhoton grew up on the south side of Pittsburgh with four siblings. His father, who was rough on his children, left the family when Dan was young, and his mother supported them by working two jobs. Dan got into a lot of trouble that he prefers not to detail, though one thing he worked at was school, which would get him a scholarship to La Salle; he decided to become a teacher because he saw it as steady work, and easy.

It was not, initially, a calling.

But Rhoton rejects the idea that he’s now running some visionary program. He will tell you that the path to ending poverty really isn’t, in fact, so complicated: “We are not some special place — we’re just executing well with some good tools. Our idea is” — here it is, their eyes always on the prize — “we get people jobs.”

Michael Cassel grew up in Pennsauken; he and his four siblings lived with his aunt, who worked for the IRS and provided the stability his parents couldn’t. He had no interest in high school, though he graduated — ­“with the lowest GPA you could imagine,” he says. Cassel wanted a job working with his hands. He saw that as manly: under the hood of a car, or in construction, building something. The problem was that at 17, 18, just coming of age, the jobs were sketchy: warehouse jobs, short-term construction. In 2019, online looking for work, he stumbled upon Hopeworks offering computer training. Why not? Maybe it was time to change things up. Which was fortunate timing, since things at his aunt’s house, where his siblings still lived as adults, had become so chaotic he had to get out; a few months into his training at Hopeworks, Cassel started living in a friend’s car.

“I was coming in late,” he remembers. “I wasn’t really being as talkative. I wasn’t focused on my work as well.” One day his career coach asked him how he was doing. It was a casual question, though it was followed by this: “I feel a change in you.” Cassel, despite a mindset of self-reliance drilled into him by his aunt, broke down in tears, and they talked.

That moment, that conversation, and what happened next changed everything for him: Hopeworks found him a bed in a shelter that night, and they supplied a computer so he could continue his training from there when COVID hit. That stability was the linchpin. Cassel went on to get work at American Water, where he’s on a crew laying water pipes. He’s found a steady gig for a strong company, building something, exactly what he always wanted. And he now shares an apartment with his fiancée, whom he met at Hopeworks.

I hear many stories, many levels of desire and challenge, during my time at Hopeworks. Kamiah Gray is the oldest of six; her parents split up when she was young, and her home life in and around Philly was chaotic. At 18, she was romantically involved with an addict, and her father, wanting her to choose herself over the relationship, gave her an ultimatum: Leave him, or leave. She took the highway, but then washed out of Temple University after a year. “I’m the sort of person who has to learn everything the hard way,” she says.

Gray spent years working in restaurants, mostly as a hostess. She wanted more. But what she lacked was an avenue in the right direction, a way to focus what is obviously an abundant amount of energy — ­“I have a massive case of ADHD,” she says — until she discovered Hopeworks.

Along with training, Hopeworks offered Gray networking events and introductions to CEOs of companies making north of $10 million in revenues, and sent her to New York for Climate Week; a few days before we talk, she was the audience favorite in a business pitch competition, describing her plans for Clever Odds and Ends, her online clothing company.

I ask Gray if she ever sleeps. She laughs — maybe not. And now she has her eyes on a new prize: becoming an AI prompt engineer. At 25, Gray has found her on-ramp.

For Willem Schrieks, 26, his career goal was never a mystery. He knew he wanted to be a designer — graphic design, that was his first interest. But getting there — that was a challenge. Schrieks grew up in Collings­wood, adopted, and had a violent home life, which played out in fights in school.

He was in his first year of community college in 2016 when he stumbled upon Hopeworks and its promise to teach him coding; he thought it was too good to be true, a scam. But within six weeks, Schrieks had a job as a web designer. He wasn’t ready for it, washing out of that job and a few more Hopeworks-connected gigs. Still, the organization had gotten him out of his parents’ house by giving him a place to live in North Camden housing they controlled (a spot they called the Crib) and kept taking him back; Schrieks would end up living in the Crib for four years.

His problems, though, showed up at Hopeworks. One day, angry about paperwork he had to fill out for the organization, he responded by emailing a diatribe to Rhoton, ripping Rhoton and calling Hopeworks a horrible place. Schrieks, never averse to a fight, showed up the next day, and when he saw Rhoton he was sure he’d be kicked out and banned from coming back. Instead, Rhoton said, “You sent me an email last night that you probably regret. Let me show you how to write another email to fix what you sent.”

Dealing with conflict calmly, reasonably — this was a revelation to Schrieks. Rhoton saw both the challenge for him and his potential, and over the next year, they spent a lot of time together as Schrieks shadowed Rhoton, who brought him to meetings to see how he conducted himself. Which was exactly what Schrieks had to learn on the way to the high-level design work he wanted: “Could I convincingly go to a CEO and say, ‘Hey, this is what I believe in, this is the next move you should make based on the research. And I know you don’t like to hear this, but this is what I believe,’ without crashing out when I get told no the first time?”

As Rhoton saw it, Hopeworks would stick with Schrieks until he got a job he didn’t blow up, and his story goes a long way to explaining why Hopeworks alums have that 90-plus percent job-retention rate after one year. Schrieks is now a senior user-experience designer at Comcast, where he makes $120,000 a year; he lives on Rittenhouse Square.

Schrieks recently joined the board of Hopeworks. “So you might say I’ve never left,” he says. And it’s certainly not lost on Dan Rhoton how far Schrieks has come.

“Willem is now,” he says, smiling at the sweet irony, “my boss.”

Rhoton’s apparent softness on first blush hides a certain ferocity he has in supporting his young students, first at St. Gabriel’s and now at Hopeworks; he believes wholeheartedly in helping his students deal with the various personal challenges and trauma so many of them have suffered — that’s how he got in the door at Hopeworks in Camden to begin with — but he is obsessed with the bottom line of what he will do for them.

“What I found — and people disagree with me on this — it’s not enough to describe trauma and talk about trauma because I know my students have got it,” he says. “All you do is you get fancy-sounding excuses. Oh, let me tell you how bad Philadelphia is. Let me tell you how much this person is struggling.” That’s what he found when he started running Hopeworks in Camden a decade ago: an obsession with how bad things were there. “And if that’s your approach to poverty, you are not going to be able to move anything.”

By the end of the first year he was in charge in Camden, the rest of the staff had quit, since Rhoton immediately began pushing them hard to get their students into the workforce — he wanted results. “And I was glad to see them go,” he says.

To get and keep a job — he can’t seem to say that enough, how important it is: “You can spend the next 20 years working on yourself. But you’re feeding your family, you’re stable. You have a house. You have medical insurance.”

So how far can Hopeworks go in making a real dent in poverty in Philadelphia?

Rhoton doesn’t know the answer to that. But I’ve learned, after spending some time with him, how the implicit It can’t be done in the question rubs him the wrong way. If I’m stuck on the overwhelming reality of poverty — if we all are — we’re missing the point.

Instead, he’s fixated on those ongoing 700 job placements a year because of what they prove.

“If we were doing 20 job placements a year,” Rhoton says, “the reaction is, that’s cute, you guys do good work. But 700 a year, that means something real. Sixty folks every month are coming out of here. Now, you look at that, you can’t say it’s boutique. You can’t say it’s accidental. Like, okay, that’s a factory of awesomeness, right? Why don’t you start your own factory?

“So it’s really all about demonstrating how effective it is on the numbers you have. It’s not the numbers exactly. It’s the success of it, that it works. You keep showing it, talking to employers. ‘Look at your needs!’” The untapped potential of communities like Kensington is what keeps Rhoton up at night, the diamonds in the rough he works with every day. “The hope is employers begin to get it.”

And that schools do. And investors.

Meanwhile, Rhoton has his eye on expanding Hopeworks to other East Coast cities; Newark is likely next. “If we can replicate this success in multiple markets,” he says, “then we’re changing the conversation in a whole different way.

“The assumption is that it’s this intractable problem, that it took hundreds of years to get here, so it’s going to take hundreds of years to fix. I get it. But what if we’re wrong? What if it is a one-generation solution, if we choose the right solution? And what if Philly was known as the city that solves the employment and workforce problem?”

Now those are very good questions.

Published as “Glimmer of Hope” in the February 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.