Check out Kansas City.

That’s what U.S. Department of Agriculture Deputy Under Secretary Patrick Penn had heard when he was looking for communities across America that were helping people in need get into meaningful jobs and thrive.

As a top administrator in the USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Division, Penn knows well, he said, that getting people off USDA-issued food stamps and into sustainable independent lives requires “a lot more than just getting a job.”

But he’d never seen such an innovative, multi-level, far-reaching collaboration as the one he witnessed in action when he came to LINC Caring Communities at Morning Star Youth and Family Life Center at 27th and Prospect Avenue on April 8.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

He was talking about the Missouri Department of Social Services and its unique collaboration with LINC to bring the community’s voice and power to distribution of community resources.

He was talking about how LINC teams up with other on-the-ground agencies like the Full Employment Council to bring together the city’s knowledge and experience.

And he marveled at how the Morning Star site in the heart of east Kansas City served as a hub of resources, ready to provide a full range of support to families and individuals who are rebuilding their lives — whether it be help with nutrition, utility bills, rent, clothing, job searching, transportation, household needs, government applications or whatever a strong community can provide.

“It’s about getting the structure you need to move from a life of dependency into a hopeful future of independence and a sustainable career,” Penn said. “All these things come together. This is my first time ever seeing anything this miraculous.”

Penn’s mission with his visit was to emphasize the USDA’s program of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training (SNAP E&T).

SNAP is the federal support commonly known as food stamps. The employment and training program that supports it, in Missouri, is called SkillUp. LINC’s workforce development team helps more than 400 individuals annually in the Missouri Work Assistance program and SkillUp gain job training, education support and help getting past life barriers.

LINC, DSS and the FEC aren’t newcomers to this work. The trio’s innovative partnership goes back 30 years, once drawing the attention and a Kansas City visit from President Bill Clinton.

But the delivery of services has continued to evolve, finding more strength in community collaboration when LINC teamed up with the Morning Star Youth and Family Life Center during the Covid-19 pandemic crisis in 2020.

That’s the beauty of the state’s model of working with community partnerships, said Melissa Wolf, DSS’s assistant deputy director for intergovernmental relations, who joined Penn on the visit to Kansas City.

“One of the things we really lean into at DSS is the creativity and the innovative ways we can serve our communities and those who are most vulnerable,” Wolf said. “Missouri is really special when it comes to innovating all these programs.”

As Penn, Wolf and others on the tour walked among the staff and volunteers at work at Morning Star, a weekly food distribution was under way, with the line of cars stretching around the center for more than five city blocks. Many people were picking out items at the clothing closet inside the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church next door. They saw the work station where some of LINC’s specially trained staff help people in need of assistance gather the documents they need, fill out the complicated online government forms, and even reach out to landlords to help resolve rent situations.

The mission at Morning Star, LINC President and CEO Janet Miles-Bartee told Penn, is to do what it takes to help anyone who comes in — including people in the SNAP SkillUp program — whatever their needs, without having to send them out somewhere else.

“They may come in for food, or employment help, or fleeing an abusive spouse,” Miles-Bartee said. “And we stay in the game to end. We stay until they reach sustainability. If they need documents, we help them get them. We go with them. They already hit a wall (before they came to Morning Star),” she said. “They will not hit a wall here.”

FEC President and CEO Clyde McQueen said Morning Star is able to provide all these services because it brings together “locally based, on-the-ground systems.”

They also are keenly attuned to data and showing value-added, measurable results.

“We don’t pass people off,” McQueen said. “We problem-solve.”

Penn toured the site with Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church Pastor John Modest Miles at his side, and learned how this center of compassion and loving energy sits on a corner — at 27th and Prospect — that had been one of Kansas City’s most desperate, crime-and-drug-plagued communities in the mid- and late-1990s.

The community center sits where there had been liquor stores. Miles led a community campaign of revival that included getting the city to build a gleaming new East Patrol and crime lab location across the street where there had been many dilapidated drug houses.

Penn took it all in and shared his excitement that the SNAP employment and training support he had come to see is anchored by such a transformed site.

“I have great faith and confidence in the partners and the people they have here at LINC,” he said. “I couldn’t be more grateful for the work we see happening right here, in real time, every single day.”