Success stories: How LINC helps courageous youth rise from broken pasts

Teens who grew up in trauma, who drifted from foster home to foster home or came under the state’s care, reach that doorstep to adulthood aching over the same needs as other teens:

A chance at school and a career. Help getting a job. A car that starts on cold days. A room of their own with heat. Clothes that feel good. A bank account. Freedom from hunger.

They wonder, will there be someone reliable they can talk to? Someone who, in the moments they need it most, cares just for them?

These are the spaces where LINC’s team of youth advocates do their work, bringing state resources to bear, acting with great care and creativity to give courageous youth like these hope and confidence — the chance they deserve.

Hundreds of youths in LINC’s service area are aging out of the foster care system, making this anxious transition to what comes next.

Here are some of their stories.

Sophia

After all she’d been through, after she’d somehow grasped one fleeting year of schooling on the green-hilled campus of her dreams, Sophia was about to hurt again, to cry again.

Old trouble was returning just as so much of her life had finally turned for the better, just two weeks before her senior year, which was supposed to be back at St. Teresa’s Academy in Kansas City.

The state’s Children’s Division in the past year had moved 17-year-old Sophia into the home of her 30-year-old Aunt Judy and her partner — a good home. Good caregivers.

She’d been paired with LINC Youth Advocate Devon Robinson, who swept into her life with an encouraging energy that Sophia loved for the ways it made her laugh.

LINC and Robinson had brought Sophia personal and financial support through the state’s Chafee foster youth program, which was rewarding her resilience with matching funds to double her part-time paychecks and boost the savings she’d been accumulating toward a hoped-for first car.

Program classes that helped her socialize and imagine a strong and independent life were repairing the damage from an entire childhood broken by the neglect of troubled parents.

The fact that she’d even made it into St. Teresa’s her junior year had shown unfathomable persistence.

She was born into trauma. Her mother had lost her first husband, and her three older siblings had lost their father because of an electrocution death on a tree-trimming job. Drug addiction and depression spiraled even after her mother remarried with Sophia’s father.

Her mother’s settlement benefits from her first husband’s death gave Sophia’s parents some means to do things like put Sophia in Catholic school, but she missed weeks of class at a time year after year when no one would take her there.

Things might start to seem better, Sophia said, “then suddenly we’d lose a house or the electricity would shut off.” She spent most of her fifth and sixth grade years living out of motels from Lenexa to North Kansas City. They got back into a small house in Independence only to see it soon condemned as unlivable.

She’d lost any hope or confidence of getting to St. Teresa’s. In fact, when it came time for her to enroll in the local public high school for her freshman year, her parents did nothing to help her. Sophia, scared and embarrassed, did not go.

That’s when Sophia’s oldest grown sister took her in and let her live with her and her family in Northeast Kansas City. Then a friend urged her sister to call the state’s youth protection hotline.

In all the darkness, Sophia had managed to keep herself from falling too far behind in academic skills. Her life was exhausting. There were times, she remembered, she’d fall asleep while trying to do school work.

“I’d wake up at 4 a.m.,” she said, “and do work and go to school.”

She struggled back, first in public high school, never losing the yearning she felt listening to Catholic school classmates sharing their assured plans to go to St. Teresa’s. Finally, her junior year, she had gotten in.

“I really wanted to go to that school,” she said.

But now, on the brink of her senior year, it was coming undone. Her Aunt Judy had learned, while working on financial aid for the coming year, that tuition obligations set up by her parents the previous year had left thousands unpaid. She couldn’t re-enroll.

The aunt, who had no children of her own, had no idea where to begin in the scramble to find a public school for Sophia.

She called Robinson at LINC. After all, Robinson had proven to be a valuable and comforting resource — “extremely helpful and quick,” Judy said. It was Robinson who had rediscovered long-shuttered joy in Sophia, taking her shopping to pick out new clothes to help her feel good about going to school and work.

She helped her get her driver’s learning permit. Helped her get an iPad to get her digitally connected.

Could she help Sophia find a good school?

The answer, Aunt Judy said, came as a shock. The Chafee program, Robinson told them, could help manage the school debt and keep Sophia where she belonged — in St. Teresa’s.

Now she’s maintaining mostly A-level grades. The dreams she’d laid out on a vision board exercise at LINC — with pictures of old European streets she wants to see someday — feel in reach.

With the Youth Future Career Program she’s “on a better path,” Sophia’s aunt said. “She’s thinking of all the possibilities.”

C.J.

With a close look in the mirror, a trace of a finger, C.J. still measures his scars.

“I was put in situations I shouldn’t have been put in,” he says.

Memories rise of mysterious men sending him into abandoned trailer homes or old farm houses to strip copper or steal tools. Each man had a fleeting connection to his mother and her turbulent life in rural northwest Missouri. His father was sent to federal prison.

There were falls and cuts. Trips and stitches. He remembers once when he followed his little sister into a dark shed when a pipe fell. He pushed her out of the way and was knocked out by the blow to his head.

Just how old he was back then, the 20-year-old C.J. today isn’t sure. But he knew he was less than 7. He was a child taking care of younger sisters, sometimes hiding them in a closet when strange people showed up, always having to be responsible.

“I remember changing diapers,” he said.

He lets all that sink in. He can sit across a table in a restaurant now and look back at those years and his subsequent time in Missouri’s foster care system with a sense of peace he’d not known before.

With the help of LINC’s youth transitions program he’s thinking past tomorrow.

LINC’s distribution of personal and financial support through Missouri’s Chafee Program for Older Youth and the Youth Future Career program has provided C.J. a laptop to go with his new college plans and good clothes for his new job. Incentive funds that match his paychecks are rewarding his work by helping pay off his car, cover its insurance, pay back rent, clear school debt and put food on his table.

“I can relax and breathe,” he said. “I can find a job I’m good at and enjoy and not just the first job I see. I’m thinking about things differently instead of day-by-day.”

This is how the state’s foster care system can do more than just pull children out of danger but go farther to help them grow and realize opportunities the same as other teens and young adults as they seek independent lives.

C.J. was lucky, he said. When he was 7, he got placed with his foster mother in the Maryville, Mo., area and she has been good to him. She kept her promise to never give up on him, even when he went through turbulent teen years.

A fight once got him a couple of nights in jail during his high school years. After high school when his car was used — not by him — for a string of crimes, the police interrogation struck a fear in him that drove him to make himself right.

“I got out of it,” he said, “but it was a culture shock.”

He separated himself from people who were bad for him. He began trying to focus on working, getting schooling, pursuing new plans to get a job in law enforcement, going to the Kansas City Police Academy.

It was a struggle with little means to make his way.

Covid stimulus checks in 2020 gave him the financial opportunity to relocate to the Kansas City area to pursue his plans. It also brought him into LINC’s territory for supporting foster youths in transition.

That’s when LINC Youth Advocate Mark Hash called and told him about the Youth Future Career Program.

There were so many tangible things that Hash offered for C.J. — opportunities for classes on financial management and future planning that really helped, plus financial support, college preparation and debt relief.

But the intangibles were just as important — someone to talk to on just living, keeping from getting things “all jumbled,” being able to plan “one step at a time.”

“You could tell Mark wants the best for kids,” C.J. said. “He genuinely cares. He has a soft spot for kids who have been through it.”

Like C.J.

Mariah

Mariah’s way out was always there, as simple as that first line or circle.

The images at work in her mind, if she could draw them across the blank page, had the power and grace to break her out of the depression of a teenage life turned inside out.

“I’d lost everything,” Mariah said. “I felt all cooped up . . . no life, no social life.”

Her grandmother had meant well when she took Mariah and her little sister into her Kansas City home and got licensed as a foster parent.

“Grandma was doing all she can,” Mariah said.

But Mariah felt too far gone. Her mother’s troubles and other family pressures had scuttled her early years in high school in Kansas’ Shawnee Mission schools. Covid and its isolation detached her from her sophomore year.

As problems with a landlord loomed, Mariah’s mother left with Mariah and her sister, taking almost nothing with them. When Mariah ultimately landed in her grandmother’s house, a child in Missouri’s foster care, it felt like an end, not a beginning.

“I thought I’d stay here till I was grown, get kicked out and have nothing.”

Take a look at her now.

She’s an artist. She has plans to put her creations on her own line of hats, hoodies and shirts. She’s saving her earnings in her new bank account.

First off, DeLaSalle happened. Her grandmother connected her with the public charter school that helped her recover from her lost high school years and got her out of the house and into an internship at Arts Tech.

Then came Steve McClellan, a LINC Youth Advocate with the and Chafee Older Youth and Youth Future Career programs that help foster youth seek healthy, independent lives.

“Instead of just wishing it, Steve made it happen,” Mariah said.

She was telling her story the same day that McClellan, that afternoon, had gone with Mariah to open her first bank account at Lead Bank, depositing money she had earned at Arts Tech along with the incentive matching funds she earned from the Youth Future Career program.

He’s helping her get ready to get her driver’s learning permit. And Mariah has also taken a personal budgeting finance class through LINC – which her grandmother also attended.

“You can tell he loves his job,” Mariah’s grandmother said. “He wants kids to excel. This program is helping her get away from the past and travel, and move forward.”

Art was Mariah’s therapy. It’s where she found peace. And there, out of the house and in Arts Tech, “people caught on to what I was doing,” she said.

She found her own identity, her unique form, “and people liked my work,” she said.

Now her senior year brims with anticipation. She plans to study graphic design in college. She’s going to learn how to create her own webpage. She sees herself starting a business to sell her designs and clothing.

Her little sister, who has joined her at DeLaSalle as a freshman, looks up to her. Mariah is relishing a feeling of control that comes from being able to secure plans on her own, taking care of her needs and not having to ask for help.

No longer is she draining her earnings through Cash App. She’s capping her spending on the app, she said, and saving her money in her new checking account. It’s a powerful feeling to be managing her money.

“I’m very confident,” she said. “I’m going to let it stack.”

Her plans for her future stand poised now with the same possibilities as her art.

“It starts out with a line or a circle,” she said, “then anything that comes to mind.”

Isaiah

At full throttle, the plane’s single engine roared, the propeller was a blur and the gray ribbon of the Wheeler Airport runway rushed below.

Isaiah gripped the control wheel with both fists. At 50 knots, with a flight instructor seated beside him, Isaiah pulled the control toward him and felt the lift in his hands.

Then he was airborne, for once feeling in control of his foster-child life, banking high into a clear blue sky in a self-given birthday present at the age of 17.

Now 18, he’s determined to be a pilot. He’s making plans to enroll in flight school. Making plans just for him.

There’s great joy to be charting his own path after growing up the oldest of four children, being the one who worried over getting them all to school, searching cupboards for meals, taking care of their four dogs in all the times the adults in their lives did not.

“It was a lot to handle,” he said.

The plane responded dutifully to the work of his hands. He and the instructor sailed over the Royals and Chiefs stadiums, swung past Worlds of Fun and drifted over rivers and fields.

The comfort he felt in the sky calmed him like the comfort he feels now as he puts his life in order.

Faith has helped. God has become his shield, he says, and helped him shed any anger over the turbulent events and people trailing behind him.

And there’s no doubt that his life took an important turn when his state case manager urged him to contact the LINC Youth Advocate, Phyllis Padgett, who was wanting to help him.

Padgett, through the state’s Chaffee program to help youth in foster care transition to independent lives, reached out to Isaiah at a difficult time during the summer of 2022.

Isaiah said he was uncomfortable asking for things, but Padgett assured him he deserved relief. The LINC program could help him with transportation for school and work, give him incentive matching funds for his work at Wal-Mart, help him get a laptop, get him a good phone, provide classes on budgeting and life management.

“I was in disbelief,” he said. “It was such a blessing. I’m able to be laid-back, relax, breathe and not stress about everything.”

When he needed to replace his old, used and beaten Dodge Neon, Padgett met him at a car dealership and helped him – financially and personally – get a good, used Ford Escape.

“They (the LINC advocate team) made it known they were there to help.”

Isaiah and his siblings were going to North Kansas City Schools into his middle school years when the troubles with his mother and stepfather escalated. The family hoped for a new start, moving to Excelsior Springs, but the dysfunction continued to spiral.

The four children held together, with Isaiah, as the oldest, often setting the alarm clocks, walking little sisters to school and making sure some kind of dinner was put on the table.

Before his senior year, the state made plans to send the siblings – now in high school and middle school – to live with a relative in Platte City. Isaiah was faced with a difficult choice.

He decided he should stay in Excelsior Springs, finding a new family to live with, and finish out his senior year at his familiar high school. It meant letting his siblings go, but they were growing up too and would be fine without their big brother.

His life feels like it’s big and brimming now. He felt it with a thrill once the flight instructor had landed the plane that August afternoon and Isaiah had stepped out, still feeling the flight controls in his hands, but planting his feet back on the ground.

“I looked back up at the sky,” he said. “And I saw how amazing life is around me. It felt like the most real experience.”

Life, he said, “felt so good. So relaxing.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer