Friends on the journey: LINCWorks helps families rise, thrive

Samantha Wrozier poses with her 3-year-old daughter, Uriah, in their home at Amethyst Place in Kansas City.

There it was — an offer to try methamphetamine.

Samantha Wrozier was still a teenager then, on a spiral from foster homes to trap houses.

Sure, take a hit, she thought. Because part of her wanted to see what it was about the drug that drove her mother before her to destroy her life.

“I found out,” Wrozier said.

* * *

She was 26 years old the day in November 2022 that she stepped into LINCWorks’ 11th-floor office in Kansas City with a newborn son held to her chest and her then 2-year-old daughter at her hand.

The case manager she met there came to her like a friend, she said. “He didn’t shame me,” she said. Aaron Bond was seeing her as a fellow traveler, as Wrozier made her required visit as a new participant in Missouri’s food stamps program — TANF, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — to get guidance and support in her pursuit of meaningful work while on state aid.

Everyone who comes to LINCWorks “is on a journey,” said Program Director Sonny Williams. “It’s what shapes the person. And we walk with them.”

They come in a multitude. LINCWorks serves five Missouri counties in the Kansas City area, and has helped more than 2,500 clients over the past two years. Its case managers maintained an average caseload of 41.3 clients. Over that time, the program has provided more than $93,000 in assistance for travel and work-related expenses. Another $29,725 has been rewarded to clients as employment incentives.

Many come with a dream.

What Wrozier’s caseworker would soon learn was that Wrozier had another daughter, her first child, that she gave away for adoption during the depths of her addiction.

The 2-year-old — Uriah — holding her hand was the daughter who, when Wrozier learned she was pregnant again, finally proved to be the motivation that got her clean.

The newborn son in her arms marked her year of sobriety.

There had been so many periods of darkness throughout her late teens and 20s. Methamphetamine had turned her into “a person I didn’t recognize,” he said. She was trapped in a co-dependent relationship, doomed to living from trap houses to cheap hotels to nights spent in cars.

Her rehabilitation as a client of ReDiscover was marred by relapses. She began seizing control only when she insisted that she be placed in a rehab that was far away, more than a simple bus ride, from the drug dens that tormented her.

Her journey to sobriety earned her an opportunity for an apartment at Amethyst Place — a haven in Kansas City that supports women and children fighting back from trauma, poverty and substance abuse. Her advisors there helped her make life-changing connections.

One was with Pawsperity — a non-profit pet grooming school that specifically aims to help individuals break out of generational poverty. Amethyst also guided Wrozier in getting state support with TANF — and that led her to LINCWorks.

Her grooming training led to a job this year at a dog grooming shop in Independence. She needed help getting a car, help with gas money, help with clothes and shoes — and LINCWorks helped her beat all the barriers.

After so many years of falling, Wrozier had solid footing. “I finally felt some security,” she said “I could find a career path.”

Sometimes, the client has a direction in mind, Williams said. And the role of the LINCWorks case manager is one of helping the client “achieve their view of success.”

Other times, the parent in need has trouble seeing a way forward. Sometimes, Williams said, the case manager is helping a client “see something they don’t see in themselves.”

* * *

Mayra Hernandez believed this much: Kansas City surely would provide opportunities that had seemed so distant in the hard Los Angeles neighborhoods she grew up in.

The child of El Salvador migrants grew up with a streak of toughness that gave her courage with her husband, Victor Cuevas, that they would find some prosperity in the Midwest. She was 30 when they came to Kansas City with their three children, then 8, 6 and 3 years old.

Mayra Hernandez with her husband Victor Cuevas and their three children.

Her mother, who struggled to get her family to the United States for the opportunities promised here, pushed Hernandez to excel in school in LA, and Hernandez earned a medical assistant certificate. But she was feeling lost and unsure when she applied for state aid and made her journey to LINCWorks.

Things were uncertain, she shared with her case manager, Angie McNealy. Her husband was working construction jobs. She had the children at home. There were child care issues. Transportation issues.

McNealy noticed in Hernandez’s account of her work and schooling history that she had also spent many hours in Los Angeles volunteering after school in her children’s school.

Maybe she’d like to work in an after-school program, McNealy said. Hernandez might be good at it. And there was a school within walking distance of their home that had many English-learning students. Her bilingual skills would be an asset.

“She was like a friend helping a friend,” Hernandez said. “They will place you in a good place. She motivated me.”

LINCWorks provided her help including a gift card to get necessary work clothes and work shoes. McNealy checked in with her every week.

And Hernandez was good with children and running classrooms and programs. After several years working on the staff at the LINC before- and after-school program at Trailwoods Elementary School in Kansas City, she recently was promoted as the site coordinator.

* * *

In its mission to guide parents toward employment and career paths, LINCWorks continues the work of welfare support that marked some of LINC’s earliest breakthroughs 30 years ago.

LINC’s early work with the state and the FEC in welfare reform drew the attention, and praise, of President Bill Clinton, seen here at a panel discussion in Kansas City in 1996 with the FEC’s Clyde McQueen and LINC founding CEO Gayle A. Hobbs.

Even President Bill Clinton took notice.

In 1994, Clinton was making welfare reform one of his major campaigns and soon he heard about a collaboration under way already in Kansas City between LINC, the state Department of Social Services and the Full Employment Council.

By 1996, the President had made two trips to Kansas City, including sitting at a two-hour panel discussion and meeting with DSS’s Marge Randle, the FEC’s Clyde McQueen and LINC founding CEO Gayle A. Hobbs.

What the Kansas City revolution championed then is still the hallmark of the work, carried on by LINCWorks, in Kansas City today.

To help with the transition to meaningful work, parents often need help with the soft job skills. They need to build resiliency. They need support with the stress of changing lives and pressure at home. And employers need to be trained as well, learning strategies to help people new to the workforce find success.

LINC continues to work with job-training specialists at the FEC, the Bishop Sullivan Center and other agencies. And it partners with support organizations like Cum Laude Educational Consultants and Midtown Psychological Services, Inc., to teach adaptability to the workplace, resiliency in meeting challenges and strategies for good mental health.

Mayra Hernandez is now the site coordinator of LINC’s after-school program at Trailwoods Elementary School.

LINCWorks helps with other needs as they arise as well, like accessing help with paying rent or utility bills.

It’s often not an easy path, Williams said. Sometimes clients stumble and fail to meet the state’s requirements for activity toward education achievement or job placement. But the case managers stay with them, if they need to reapply.

“We can start fresh today,” Williams said.

But so many more make it.

And LINCWorks’ goal, Williams said, is to act as guides, urging each client to find their own path, find that meaningful work of their choosing, “empowered with confidence.”

* * *

Sometimes life hits hard. The newborn son Wrozier held in her arms the day she walked in LINCWorks would die two months later of sudden infant death syndrome.

It was devastating, but Wrozier held on to her sobriety. She did so out of her desire to honor him. The promise of his pregnancy had driven her even harder to stay clean, doubling the motivation that had come with the birth of Uriah.

And so it goes with her growing independence. She’s working now. “I absolutely love my job,” she says of the dog grooming experience.

As she recounted the journey on a recent rainy morning, Uriah sprang about their apartment, digging out crayons, putting on her pink bike helmet — backwards — and tugging at her mother for attention.

When it came time to pose for a picture, she nestled in tight, looking up at her mother’s smile.

“I want to be someone my kids can be proud of,” Wrozier said. "They can look back and say, ‘Yeah, we had problems, but we got through it.’”

If she can make it here from where she was, anyone can, Wrozier said. To those who are battling addiction, or caught in other traps standing between them and their better selves, she offers inspiration. It echoes the LINCWorks mission.

“If you want to get out, you can,” she said. “You’re worth it.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer