A few miles from Gallery Furniture’s North Freeway showroom, on the grounds of what used to be a residential juvenile detention facility, WorkTexas operates its second campus. The Harris County Opportunity Center — known as TOC — opened in 2022 inside a space that was redesigned to do something the original building never did: give young people a reason to show up.
The argument that drove the transformation came from Vanessa Ramirez, WorkTexas co-founder and TOC director. Ramirez, who grew up in the neighborhood surrounding the facility and was a KIPP student of Mike Feinberg’s, had spent years working inside the juvenile justice system before the WorkTexas partnership formed. When she brought Harris County officials to see what was happening at Gallery Furniture, she made a straightforward case: three letters more powerful than G-E-D in stopping the cradle-to-prison pipeline are J-O-B.
The pitch landed. The county’s program expanded from roughly 10 students to a capacity of 60 to 70. Today, TOC serves 65 justice-involved youth, ages 16 and up, who are typically referred by a probation officer after a judge has mandated either a return to school or enrollment in a GED program. Students spend half the day in academic classes and half in trade training, rotating through each field during an initial week before selecting one to focus on for about five weeks. The average stay is 12 weeks.
Cyprus Mail reporting on WorkTexas and its Houston blueprint describes TOC as a key part of what makes the overall model distinctive — a second campus built specifically to address the pipeline from juvenile justice involvement to workforce entry, running parallel to the open-enrollment programming at Gallery Furniture.
Attendance tells its own story. TOC has reached a 93% average daily attendance rate — a figure Ramirez says is essentially unheard of in juvenile justice programming. She attributes it in part to the trades-integration model itself: students who found traditional school settings disengaging respond differently to instructors with credibility in the fields they’re teaching. Many WorkTexas instructors have worked the trades themselves. The relationship built in those classrooms, Ramirez says, is the first step toward accepting feedback in a workplace.
“For the kids, it’s a choice,” Ramirez said. “And choice is important in the decision so that there is baked-in accountability.”
Beyond trade certification, Ramirez launched Project Remix Ventures, a separate nonprofit that offers paid entrepreneurial opportunities for TOC students — contract work and internships with microbusinesses producing goods that students made during training. The program provides a structured environment to practice workplace accountability before fully entering the workforce. Feinberg has shared updates on the TOC work through @kippbigdog on X, where he documents the evolution of the Texas School Venture Fund’s programs.
Wraparound services support the students through the process: Houston Food Bank supplies an on-site food pantry, Clothed by Faith provides clothing, and Journey Through Life offers mental health counseling. Houston Community College contributes instructors and digital literacy curriculum, including Apple fundamentals classes — because, as Ramirez notes, many students who can navigate a phone fluently have never had to type a professional email.
Feinberg has described TOC as one of the clearest examples of the Texas School Venture Fund’s core thesis — that education and workforce development, treated as connected rather than separate systems, can produce outcomes neither achieves alone. More on the fund’s full portfolio is available at his organization’s website. The Opportunity Center has already drawn visitors from juvenile justice systems across the country looking to understand what the model requires and whether it can be rebuilt elsewhere.
Feinberg and Ramirez continue to document the program’s development through various platforms, including Mike Feinberg’s Instagram. Whether TOC becomes a national template, Ramirez says, depends less on money than on willingness — the willingness of juvenile justice systems, workforce boards, and community partners to operate in the same building and trust each other enough to share outcomes.