The spring weather in Omaha can be brutal. Luckily, it was an unusually pleasant day when Carolyn Williamson, a matronly woman with cropped silver hair, a striking yellow cardigan and red-rimmed glasses clipped the ribbon strung across the doorway of Protégé House.
The dowdy brick building just north of Omaha’s centre was once a convent. On April 10, 2019 it was reopened by the charity Girls Inc as a house for troubled women too old for foster care but young enough still to need a supportive home. In many respects the ribbon-cutting was unremarkable, yet the genesis of Protégé House was far more momentous than the humdrum setting indicated.
The money to run the programme came from Protégé Partners, a New York investment firm that had lost an epic, decade-long wager with Omaha’s most famous resident: the multibillionaire investor Warren Buffett. And this was a bet with implications far beyond a repurposed convent in sleepy Omaha — with a moral that is particularly poignant today.