by Kristen Wile

Just more than a year ago, the Charlotte culinary scene grieved the loss of William-Allen Peterson following his unexpected death at the young age of 31. Peterson was the executive chef at Foxcroft Wine Co.’s Waverly location, and was earning a reputation for being a fair leader with a desire to nurture the careers of those in his kitchen.

Now, a year after William-Allen Peterson’s passing, the chef’s father has put his grief toward memorializing his son’s legacy by launching a nonprofit. Since William-Allen’s death, Morris Peterson has been working diligently on creating the Chef William-Allen Peterson Culinary Arts Foundation. The intention of the foundation is to give young chefs the opportunities to follow their passion — something William-Allen Peterson was able to do at a formative age.

Peterson joined a culinary arts program as a high schooler, and according to his father, never strayed from that career path since. In phone conversations during car rides to and from work, the father and son would have discussions about kitchen staff and how there was little opportunity for mentorship and growth unless you were lucky enough to have a leader step up and guide you. For Peterson, that was Charlotte chef David Quintana — and eventually, Peterson became that mentor for his employees. After William-Allen’s tragic passing, Morris Peterson began researching how to ensure other people with the same passion also have the chance to follow their passion into a career.

“My goal from now on is to create opportunities for young men and women that they would not normally get,” he says. “It’s an expensive career field to get into. It’s a challenging field, especially for young ladies to get into. … We started looking at the data sets, William was in the sixth percentile, from an age group, from an ethnicity. And we started looking at these things and said, ‘Look, there’s a lot of kids that will never get a shot.'” 

Peterson was determined to give more of those kids a chance. He has a background working in defense, and brought together his network to help him research and launch the nonprofit. The group hopes to play a significant role in raising and investing funds for an ongoing financial stream, then offer financial support to programs working with middle and high school students in whatever ways the programs need. Though the nonprofit is getting its start in Charlottesville, where Morris is based, and Charlotte, where Peterson lived and worked, the idea is to support programs across the country. That will include the funding of culinary scholarships, but also more practical ways like ensuring students have their own knives they can practice with at home — something William-Allen often did. In Charlotte, for example, the foundation is looking at helping students with the expenses of a culinary career.

“Students can’t afford to buy their culinary tools, they can’t afford to buy their clothing, their nonslip footwear,” he says. “…We’re talking about modifying the program to where we would be able to get tool kits into the hands of students earlier, so they’re better and more skilled because they have identified that as a gap.”

Peterson also hopes to create a network of chef mentors that can support students in schools, providing that mentorship that is so valuable in an industry like hospitality. 

“We’re looking at everything from curriculum development to augmenting programs, guest speakers, guest instructors and leveraging our 501c3 status with corporations that can lend us chefs and can lend us experts from the real world that will be able to come in and counsel and work with young culinarians and get them going into the industry with their eyes wide open,” he says. 

The foundation expects to have its 501c3 status confirmed any day now, and on the anniversary of William-Allen’s death, announced its intention to provide student scholarships in the young chef’s honor. Over the next year, Morris Peterson plans to raise $200,000, and doesn’t see much of an obstacle in doing so.

“We’re a start up, but we’re experienced — our board of directors are very experienced defense industry, folks that love to eat, that are globally traveled, but more importantly, they understand how to execute a mission,” he says. “And our mission is to help these kids that are very talented, many of which will never see the light of day because they’ll never see an opportunity. They can’t pick up the phone and call a chef Quintana and say ‘hey, sir, can you put me in touch with the people in the hiring department at Compass USA?’ The whole goal here is to take an entrepreneurial approach to this nonprofit world, find the problems, fix them or enlist the assistance of others where we can.”

Learn more about the foundation here.