BREAKING BREAD recently with Dan Rogers, CEO of the Cherry Street Mission and Life Revitalization Center, I asked what I quickly realized was a dumb question: Are you traveling over the holidays?

Mr. Rogers and his family haven’t traveled over Thanksgiving or Christmas for many years. Those are days when Cherry Street feeds hundreds of people — kind of his Super Bowl.

Mr. Rogers reminds me more of a football coach — a very, very smart one with a complicated playbook — than a minister or a shelter director, though he is both. I’ve never had a scriptural or theological discussion with him. It’s all Xs and Os — how to get stuff done. The proof of his faith is in work, action, accomplishment. Mr. Rogers is always looking for a fresh insight and the next innovation. He’s always upping his game.

The game for him is not only feeding or sheltering those who need shelter or food. It is life revitalization. He doesn’t want to simply house people who aren’t making it. He wants to help them figure out how to reconstruct and reinvent their lives. He’s working with a different model — not an easy one to realize. But he’s doing it. He’s been transforming the old Macomber School into an adult vocational school. The goal is to turn the homeless into the gainfully employed. And not just people with jobs, but people who can hold jobs because their inner lives — psychological and spiritual — are whole and calm and balanced.

Mr. Rogers has just graduated four people from his Life Revitalization call center school. They all have jobs. Soon five will graduate from auto body repair. They too all have promised placements.

What employers tell Mr. Rogers is that hiring people is not their problem. Their problem is knowing the people they hire will show up every day. “We can help with that,” says Dan Rogers. “That’s what we do.”

The Life Revitalization Center will be adding training programs in tool and die, welding, and the culinary arts next.

Mr. Rogers figured out early on that he ought not reinvent the wheel but, instead, partner with community colleges and technical programs and bring them to Macomber.

His latest collaboration? A partnership with Goodwill Industries of Northwest Ohio. And a day when vouchers were given to Cherry Street Mission Ministries guests to shop for winter clothing.

The co-operative model (bring needed skills to us and our skills to the needy, which Cherry Street is doing in the south end) is working. That call center graduation was the first graduation in the building since Macomber closed in 1991. And the amazing thing about that building, sturdily built, is that it is mostly still intact. Moreover, Dan Rogers, being Dan Rogers, has restored what was not — like the gym — usually with volunteer labor.

Work on the kitchen will begin soon, which will serve not only the culinary school, but provide for a food court, where those down on their luck and local attorneys and accountants can eat side by side. Instead of a soup or bread line, a food court. Instead of “the homeless,” human beings retooling.

The kitchen is key to the Life Revitalization Center and will be completed in May.

Building an adult vocational school — rebuilding lives instead of warehousing broken lives — these are big, bold dreams. There will be speed bumps, as there already have been. But Mr. Rogers is as intense a pragmatist as he is a visionary.

The essence of poverty, says Dan Rogers, is a poverty of soul, spirit, or of community. “It’s entirely possible,” he says of a man or a woman living on the street, “that this person just doesn’t have a friend.”

Lack of money, mental health problems, or substance abuse problems, he believes firmly, simply interact with a poverty of soul. If you are not poor in spirit, or friendship, you probably can overcome. If you are alone, you probably cannot overcome.

When someone graduates from the Life Revitalization Center, they keep getting mentored. They don’t get dropped on the doorstep of a new job. They are not left alone.

There are 17,000 homeless people in Greater Toledo. Can they all get jobs? Not without new industry — but new industry, says Mr. Rogers, will not come without an able work force.

“We want our own model of economic development,” he says. “Not Cleveland’s or Dayton’s.” Maybe the model is life revitalization.

“There is no such thing as a poor leader,” Mr. Rogers told me. “You either are a leader or you are not.” Some of the great leaders in this city — like Deidra Lashley at Bethany House or Denise Fox at Aurora House — run shelters and missions. Dan Rogers is an extraordinary leader and manager.

In this winter of discontent, I find inspiration in our true leaders — the servant leaders. They remind me that change brings hope, and hope makes change possible. Babies keep being born, new years keep dawning, and pragmatic dreams are sometimes realized.

Keith C. Burris is a columnist for The Blade.

Contact him at: kburris@theblade.com or 419-724-6266.

First Published December 25, 2016, 5:00 a.m.