“I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur,” Ms. Brodie, 27, told us on a recent morning in her apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “I just had this crazy idea that no one else was doing. I kept waiting for someone else to do it, until two years ago when my husband asked me, ‘What are you waiting for?’”

We sat down with Ms. Brodie for a conversation as part of our series about the people and inspirations behind local philanthropies.

For Ms. Brodie, food and service run in the family. Her grandmother published a well-known book of recipes in South Africa in the 1960s, which raised funds for the Union of Jewish Women. Her father taught her how to drive while shuttling leftover food from local restaurants to shelters. And Ms. Brodie would often spend Sunday afternoons giving cooking lessons to her friends and then taking extra meals to shelters to eat with the residents.

After college, she would often volunteer at a homeless shelter before heading off to work at the Human Rights Campaign in Washington.

“I was really struck by this idea of us just handing over the food and thought, ‘What would it look like to do this differently?’ And then I would go to my office and work with refugees and asylees and think, ‘Huh, we can do something different, right now.’”

Ms. Brodie had no background in the food industry aside from a summer spent scooping ice cream as a teenager, so she enrolled at the Institute of Culinary Education in Lower Manhattan. She also attended a food business boot camp in Harlem and began picking up shifts at restaurants.

After discussing the idea with friends, meeting with philanthropists and sending “millions of emails,” she set up her classroom cafe in June. Nearly half of her students received job offers before they had completed the program.