It made sense. If Mandi Davis was going to use a day off work with her toddler son to talk about her brightening life, why not meet at the PlayPlace in the Independence McDonald’s where she’s now one of the managers?

Because Oliver, a delightful handful at 21 months, needs a place to play.

“So smart,” his 22-year-old mother says. “So sweet.”

She swept him into her arms and stood at a window in the late-afternoon winter glow. The light settled softly like the better days Davis has enjoyed since she began getting help from LINC’s Missouri Work Assistance program.

Every day that she enjoys new work friends and takes pride in earning trust and responsibilities carries her farther away from what she called the depression and anxiety of feeling there was nothing she could do.

At the age of 17, as the Covid pandemic was scrambling her senior year of high school, she was in one of a series of abusive relationships, she said. Davis was the oldest of four children in her family, which had moved to Independence from Portland, Ore.

She lost track of the good student she had been, who’d been interested in becoming an interpreter for the deaf. The bad relationship was isolating her. “He wouldn’t let me talk to anybody,” she said.

She enrolled for her senior year at Truman High School, but it was all online and it was too easy for her to drop out. Then, in the spring of 2024, she gave birth to her son with a father who is “out of the picture.”

Her parents were helping her, but their resources were limited. She needed to figure out how to make her own way, but it was hard to work while raising a baby. Stress overcame her as she felt all she could do “was sit at home watching my kid and nothing else.”

And the cost of diapers and baby wipes alone was overwhelming her.

In mid-2025 she applied for food stamps, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. And that’s when she met LINC — or, more specifically, her LINC case manager, Ed Cason.

LINC, as a contractor in the Missouri Workforce Assistance program, reaches out to parents receiving state aid to help them tackle the state’s requirement that recipients be pursuing work or education.

Cason’s support came in waves. First, Davis said, she needed a motivator, someone to press her to seek out and complete job applications. She needed someone to encourage her to get out and interview.

She needed childcare, and the state subsidized those costs so her weekly bill was just $35. She needed help with transportation, so LINC funds supported the cost of driver services.

She started work at the McDonald’s in Independence in June, 2025. She had worked there before, but this time, with the childcare and transportation support and other incentives, she could be a reliable worker. She could forge strong work relationships. She made friends.

Davis remembers the moment in November, while working near some of her managers, when they were talking about plans for grooming new managers.

And Davis said one of them said, “And my next choice for a manager is . . .”

Davis pantomimed what her manager did at that moment, opening her hands as her manager had done with Davis like a surprise ta-da! unveiling.

“She told me I would make a good manager,” Davis said. “And then I thought, ‘OK. I think I could make a good manager.'”

Cason isn’t surprised by how well Davis is doing.

“I saw right off that Mandi was a client that just needed a little assistance, and a fair chance,” he said. “I saw early on that she was driven and self-motivated. She has a great personality and is very easy to get along with, and those two things alone can get you very far in today’s work force. She definitely takes pride in her job, and loves what she does. I believe Mandi has found the recipe for success.”

Davis feels like she has a foothold now. She’s working on getting funds together to buy a car and getting a driver’s license. Maybe she can take another look at pursuing other dreams, like becoming the interpreter for the deaf she imagined in high school. She can see a life ahead with choices.

“When I got offered the management position,” she said, “I thought, this is working out for me.”

As Davis told her story, she frequently looked out, smiled and waved at a passing co-worker. She laughed with another mother as each tracked their child around the PlayPlace jungle gym.

Now, she holds her son in her arms with fresh hope. And she says:

“I want him to have a good life.”