Mike Feinberg
Mike Feinberg

A sign on the exterior of the metal building next to Gallery Furniture reads: "Work is life's greatest therapy." Inside, welding stations and electrical training rigs sit a few hundred feet from mattress displays and living room sets. On weekday mornings, high school students stream in through the same entrance that furniture shoppers use on weekends.

Neither of the two buildings WorkTexas occupies was designed for education. One is a repurposed corner of a Houston furniture showroom. The other is a former residential juvenile detention facility that held young people for a different reason entirely. Mike Feinberg, co-founder of WorkTexas, chose both deliberately, and the choice reveals something essential about how he thinks the program has to work.

"Schools don't have to do it all, but schools can be the hub because schools are where the kids are spending the majority of their waking hours," Feinberg has said. The question for WorkTexas wasn't where to build a campus. It was where people already were.

How Mike Feinberg Turned a Furniture Showroom into a Training Center

When Feinberg began developing the WorkTexas concept in 2019, he went to Jim McIngvale — the Houston businessman known as "Mattress Mack," who had been KIPP's very first funder more than 30 years earlier. McIngvale had excess retail space at Gallery Furniture and a clear view of what wasn't working in his neighborhood.

"I see the people coming up here asking for money in a stream of hopelessness constantly," McIngvale said, speaking from inside the store surrounded by motivational banners about hard work and perseverance. "Giving them money doesn't work, because it's gone the next day and they're back in the same situation. I wanted to figure out a way we could teach these people a trade. Rather than give them a fish, they could learn how to fish and feed themselves."

McIngvale donated about 15,000 square feet of his showroom and converted it into a trade school. The location was no accident. Gallery Furniture sits in a low-income Houston neighborhood, reachable by public transit, recognizable to residents, and associated with a local figure they already trusted. Rather than asking potential participants to travel to an unfamiliar college campus, WorkTexas put the training where they already lived.

Mike Webster, who helped build the program as associate vice chancellor of workforce instruction at Houston Community College before becoming HCC's president, described the difference plainly. "What we didn't have was the Mattress Mack bullhorn to get out there and say, 'Hey, come on down and get trained,'" Webster said. "It kind of blew everybody's mind at the college, and I think it still kind of blows people's minds."

Today, the Gallery Furniture campus houses two overlapping programs. During the day, Premier High School, a public charter that has operated at the location for 25 years, serves students in credit recovery and open enrollment, combining trades training with academic coursework toward a high school diploma. WorkTexas keeps the building open in the evenings for adult courses across more than a dozen trade areas, serving participants whose average age is 31 and whose age range has run from 17 to 78.

Mike Feinberg on What the Second Campus Was Built to Do

Several miles from Gallery Furniture, WorkTexas operates at The Opportunity Center, or TOC, which opened in 2022 inside a facility that had previously housed the Burnett-Bayland Rehabilitation Center, a residential juvenile detention program. Harris County repurposed the building as part of a broader effort to shift toward community-based approaches for justice-involved youth.

The connection between the two campuses was Vanessa Ramirez, who co-founded WorkTexas alongside Feinberg and McIngvale and serves as director of TOC. Ramirez had been working with the Harris County Juvenile Probation Department on workforce pathways for youth in the justice system. She brought county officials to Gallery Furniture to see what WorkTexas was doing, and the visit seeded the idea of a second campus.

"While the GED work they were doing was nice," Feinberg has said, "three letters more powerful to stop the cradle-to-prison pipeline than G-E-D would be J-O-B."

The program at TOC grew from a 10-student operation to one serving 60 to 70 students. As of early 2025, TOC had 63 students enrolled with a wait list, and average daily attendance had reached 93%, a figure Ramirez says is uncommon in juvenile justice programming. Recidivism data support the approach: in 2022, about 48% of youth in the county's juvenile justice system reoffended. Among TOC participants in 2023, that figure dropped to 28%.

The building serves as what Feinberg calls a hub. On any given day, it houses GED instruction run by a Harris County charter school, trades training from WorkTexas instructors, entrepreneurship and music production classes from Project Remix Ventures, and wraparound services from partners including Houston Food Bank, mental health organization Journey Through Life, and clothing nonprofit Clothed by Faith.

"To truly get nonprofits to collaborate, that's the magic. That's the secret sauce," Feinberg has said of the model. "Schools don't have to do it all, but schools can be the hub."

What the Two Locations Tell Us About Mike Feinberg's Approach

The two campuses are different in almost every respect except the logic behind them. One started with a furniture billionaire who had spare retail space and a philanthropic instinct. The other grew out of a county government looking to reimagine a facility it no longer wanted to use as a detention center. Neither was purpose-built. Both were retrofitted around an existing community anchor.

That pattern is, by Feinberg's account, the point. WorkTexas was never designed to build the kind of gleaming standalone campus that signals institutional permanence. It was designed to go where people already were, embed in institutions they already knew, and make the path to enrollment as short as possible.

Houston Community College formalized that embeddedness by designating both Gallery Furniture and The Opportunity Center as satellite HCC campuses, giving participants access to additional resources, including ESL classes, computer literacy instruction, and adult GED preparation alongside the trades training WorkTexas provides.

When Feinberg describes what makes the model transferable to other cities, he points not to the buildings but to the relationships. Every community, he argues, has the functional equivalent of a Gallery Furniture: a trusted local anchor willing to open its doors. Finding that anchor, and the Mattress Mack figure willing to champion it, is where replication starts. "Every community has someone like a Mack who is a connector or a local celebrity who could play that role if the community so chose," he has said.

The furniture is still for sale on the showroom floor. The welding rigs are in the back. It works.