Local chef Trina Williams cooks for numerous local businesses, agencies and nonprofit organizations, as well weddings and other special occasions.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of a series of Saturday profiles of area residents and their stories. To suggest a profile, contact features editor Burton Cole at bcole@tribtoday.com or metro editor Marly Reichert at mreichert@tribtoday.com.
YOUNGSTOWN — Most people who come to businesses to meet friends for lunch have pleasant social interactions with one another.
For a few others, though, such an ordinary routine can be life-changing. Just ask Trina Williams.
“Pat Kerrigan (executive director of the Oak Hill Collaborative in Youngstown) came outside and asked me what am I looking for? He then tasted the food I sold,” recalled Williams, 51, a 1989 South High School graduate who grew up on Youngstown’s South Side.
Impressed with the sample he received, Kerrigan, a former Youngstown Municipal Court judge, had barely finished it before asking his assistant, Rebecca Solden, to create a Facebook page and business card for Williams “for a business I did not have yet,” she remembered.
“He saw something I did not see,” Williams said, referring to Kerrigan’s sense that she had a blossoming business acumen.
True to form, the timing and chance encounter were the first ingredients for what eventually turned into A Fresh Wind Catering LLC, a business Williams began six to seven years ago. A Fresh Wind lists as its primary objectives delivering healthful, affordable and unique food options, using original recipes.
In addition to offering her catering services for weddings, bat mitzvahs and other special occasions, Williams reaches out to numerous area barber shops, nursing homes and agencies as well as nonprofit and for-profit organizations. They include the YWCA of Youngstown, the League of Women Voters, the Youngstown Rotary Club and Mahoning Valley Sojourn to the Past, whose executive director, Penny Wells, was Williams’ seventh-grade history teacher.
She also provides catering twice weekly to those who are part of Inspiring Minds, an initiative founded in 2015 to expand services to underrepresented students in grades nine to 12.
For the past three months, Williams, a single mother of two daughters, Aniya Williams, 16, and Daysha Williams, 28, also has taught virtual cooking classes to students at Youngstown Rayen Early College, she added. Part of that effort included a “Book and Cook” literacy program in which the students read a book about a Spanish chef before she prepared a Spanish dish for them, she explained.
Williams’ cooking prowess and experience in the culinary industry first manifested themselves in 1993, when she began as a server at Youngstown State University, which morphed into her preparing delicatessen foods, baking and working at a chef’s table. After being trained as a certified chef, Williams worked at Christman Dining Hall, a cafeteria on the YSU campus.
“Jim Tressel was winning a lot (as head coach of the YSU Penguins), and I was glad to be able to feed the football players,” she recalled.
Soon after, a local sheriff’s deputy named John Peace informed Williams that the Mahoning County Jail needed a cook, which resulted in her working there about five years during the evenings. Then Williams took her talents to Big A Drive Thru on the South Side, a position she called “the launching pad to when I wanted to sell dinners and make food,” which she considered a hobby at the time, she explained.
In 2015, the mother of two came to Oak Hill Collaborative Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to community revitalization via small-business development and neighborhood-beautification efforts to improve the quality of life in the corridor.
Among those Williams credits with assisting her are Dionne Lacey-Dowdy, executive director of United Returning Citizens, an agency that gives former inmates opportunities to be educated and find safe places for them to transition to when back in society; Kristen Olmi, a grant writer and consultant with the collaborative who helped Williams’ business get off the ground and connected her with many area agencies; and Rebecca Soldan, Kerrigan’s assistant.
Williams also is an active voice and force in the community in which she grew up. She reaches out to those who are struggling in a variety of ways, including carrying Narcan to help those who suffer an opioid overdose, she added.
Any discussion about A Fresh Wind Catering would be incomplete if it neglected to include the spiritual connotations. The name was the result of a prayer that led to a “whisper of God,” said Williams, who added, “God is driving this whole business.”
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