Tell me a little bit about yourself and what it’s like being a parent today.
My name’s Ayanna. I was a member of LIFT for two years. I currently work as a family liaison at a public charter school. I remember back in the day we had to write three LIFT goals, and one of my goals was to be able to give back what was given to me and in some way be able to be some sort of parent coach or someone that could help a parent when they’re in the fog of a crisis be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And here we are now, years later and that’s exactly what I do every day.
I have about 120 families on my caseload. I am the first triage for families before they are referred for our social worker or our clinical psychologist or our school counselor. I get to use some of the techniques that with all of my LIFT coaches – I love the fact that most of the LIFT coaches had a social work background, or they were in Master of Social Work programs – that approach of really being, ‘we’re here rooting for you, we’re here to be on your team, not to be adversarial, not to be gatekeepers. We’re here to push you forward from wherever your starting spot is.’ I think a lot of times, programs require families to come to the starting line with their full uniform on, with all their spikes ready to go, and then they’re supposed to go out here and run this race. I feel like when I was working with LIFT, they had a really keen understanding that not everybody’s going to come to the line with everything they need, so let’s start from where the families are. And that’s generally the approach that I take with the families that I deal with.
When I came to LIFT, I was pregnant. I had an 18-month-old by my side. I didn’t know what to do. I was coming out of an abusive situation with my ex who served in the military for many years, who had PTSD. I came to LIFT at my rock bottom. I didn’t have health insurance. I hadn’t applied for public benefits. I had run out of the last little bit of savings that I had accessible. I just was about maybe three or four months out from losing my job because I couldn’t handle having two kids that were older, one kid that was a toddler and being pregnant, with a high-risk pregnancy at that. But at LIFT, there was always a smile.
Many times, when we ask for help, when you are at your rock bottom, there are gatekeepers that, just like at Buckingham Palace, keep a very guarded approach. Whether it’s making you come up to their agency with 15 different triplicate copies of paperwork just to say you need help. Maybe they don’t listen to your unique circumstances that are facing you. Maybe they ask you a lot of questions that can trigger anxiety, re-traumatizing by having to bring all of these things up and analyzing, hoping that you’re going to get assistance. That’s not what I experienced when I worked with LIFT. I was treated as a human being. I was treated as someone that was dimensional, of value, of worth. Kind of like if you were to drop a diamond in a big muddy puddle versus just being concerned about the mud, they’re like, ‘oh, wow, it’s a diamond. Come on in diamond. Oh, I see you’re a little muddy, let’s take some time and clean you up a little bit. But right now, we see and we love you as the diamond that you are.’ That’s what happened when I walked into LIFT spaces and then continuously stayed with LIFT.
People undervalue what it means to have someone by your side that’s not a relative, that’s not someone who’s a friend. I feel like during that time of my life, LIFT was that part of you that says you still matter, you can do this. If on this day you can’t, we will still be with you the next day when you are ready and even if you aren’t ready, we will still be there.
One of my biggest takeaways from my lived experience, that I use to this day, is this notion that whoever walks in the door, they’re a diamond. And even if they don’t act like the diamond that they are, even if they don’t present with the diamond that they are, that every day is a new opportunity to brush the mud off.
I’m fully forever grateful for LIFT being there and making sure that I survived through that. My little baby is turning five in March, the middle schoolers are now about to graduate from high school. There were some other very tangible pieces that I learned during that LIFT process that I wasn’t aware of before – credit management, financial management. I lived my entire life with a, ‘oh, it’s payday, pay what you can and, and pray for the rest,’ and not really having an even two weeks out, one month out, three months out, one year out financial plan. I thought financial plans were something for rich people and not for anyone else. I got my credit much better; I’m in the 700 club now. My credit is much better than back then thanks to a lot of the gems that I got from those credit workshops.
I’m currently fighting cancer. I had a double mastectomy in April of last year. I had high dose chemo and radiation that ended this past August. I’m still not out of the woods. But to have gone through that and to not be in medical debt, to have more tools on my tool belt than that shut down, fight, or flight. The tools that I learned with LIFT gave me some other ways to process.
You’ve also stepped directly into the advocacy space, and you even gave testimony to the DC Council on the child tax credit. What inspired you to stand up and use your voice to advocate for the CTC?
Sometimes the biggest stressors people don’t realize that, they might say, ‘oh, you know, I spent 200 bucks on a dinner or two or three right before.’ When you’re in crisis, $200 is a lot. $200 is the difference between going to a food bank or going and getting something that you’re supposed to get. I’m not completely out of the woods with my health care, [and] once the doctor’s receptionist said that my co-pay was $100 and I was like, ‘OK,’ and I started doing the numbers in my head And I’m going through all that and then she stopped and said, oh, wait a minute, no, your co-pay is not $100. It’s $20.’ And I remember my anxiety level going down tremendously — over $75.
So, when we talk about the tax credit and the difference between someone filing or not because they think they owe. But they’re not understanding that there is a tax credit, so they don’t file because they’re like, ‘oh, I don’t want to owe money to the IRS.’ Even though in most of our cases, if you’re making less than $80,000 in Washington, DC, that earned income tax credit is essential.
Back to the advocacy part; these are not things that we learn in school. Our kids often go to school, and they’re put in front of screens, and they’re told the value of knowing the different ways to add 1 + 1 or divide by 10 but the notion of finances are not being formalized, especially for high school students or young parents to know that there are opportunities when you file your taxes. I think that having the tax credits and being informed about taxes and the importance of filing, I just think that there’s so many people that would get tax refunds.
I think that there needs to be more opportunities or government agencies – that are constantly inundated with families that are in different levels and varying levels of crisis – to be able to have a scaffold to dealing with it versus just going to some office and dealing with some person that has zero training, zero desire to like be comprehensive.
If you spent a decent amount of time on public assistance, either in your childhood or as an adult, you may know how to navigate those systems. But when you make that immediate jump into the full-time employment world, navigating what the tax pieces are sometimes seems like a foreign language. So, having coaching, included to these programs, I think are essential because then the politicians can’t come back and say, ‘Oh, well, we allocated all these budgetary funds for this and nobody used it,’ or ‘nobody applied it to their taxes.’ I think that by having that education and having organizations that can be passed through for education, it’s essential so that people can actually take advantage of the opportunity that’s there for them for sure.
What was it like giving testimony to the council about what the CTC meant to you? Did you feel like your experience was valued?
I definitely felt like I was giving back to what was given to me. And I don’t mean that in a quid pro quo kind of way, but I just mean that I know for a fact that my circumstance, my situation, was what it was and it was difficult. But I’m also very aware that there are many others that are in a similar situation that will not have the education to leverage to be able to have even their daily voice uplifted. I’m also hyper aware that when some people get in front of politicians and legislators and folks with a bunch of letters behind their name, there have been more interactions of being looked down at than the interactions of being lifted up.
I feel like The Lorax, to be very candid with you. I’m very aware that there is a privilege in being able to speak to what you’ve been through when what you’ve been through isn’t glamorous and it isn’t super exciting. But it is the walk that so many people have to deal with just to navigate and move into society. I felt dutiful. That’s the best way I can put it. I felt like, ‘alright, you being given a shot to speak to this, it’s not pretty, it’s not glamorous, it’s honest.’
Like I said, I felt dutiful. I felt dutiful for every female grandma that I sat next to in these courthouses, in these same buildings and in the Department of Health and all these other spaces, trying to hold it together. For the person that might be fighting in their addiction and couldn’t articulate what they were going through. I feel obligated and it was my duty to say what could be said to assist decision makers with maybe connecting a little bit with the world in a space that they rarely have to touch. We might just be talking about a tax credit, but how many times every day do parents look at their children and make really difficult choices because, like Biggie Smalls used to say, I was just trying to feed my daughter?
Nobody wakes up at four years old and is like, ‘I’m gonna be the best drug dealer ever, or I’m gonna be the best alcoholic there is, or I’m gonna be the best opioid addict that’s floating around these streets.’ Kids don’t wake up like that. They wake up like ‘I want to be a firefighter. I want to be a police officer. I want to be rich. I want to be a basketball player.’ They have all these hopes and these dreams, and as they get older, they find themselves in circumstances where they’re now guiding someone else along and they’re making choices and decisions, sometimes, because they are looking at a bank account with a negative balance. So, if a tax credit pushes that out, two weeks, three weeks even, and financial management classes enable people to leverage whatever that refund is in a way that is longer lived, I think that that creates more secured environments; a place for the children that are in their care. I feel empowered, which is amazing.
Do you have any words of advice or suggestions for how you can help others feel empowered to use their voice?
I would say you’re okay if you don’t feel comfortable using your voice. Or if you do feel comfortable, it’s okay either way. I mean, sharing your story is a way to use your voice. That’s sometimes the most important part.
I’ll be candid with you, especially in this time that we’re living in now, as a family support worker at my school, my job has now increased substantially because now we got parents coming in that have never been on a side of even thinking about where their next check is coming from and they’ve lost their jobs. The tension is increasing with our parent-to-parent interactions at school where I’m at, when parents are coming in and dropping their kids off late or picking them up early, you can see the strain in their faces.
I think that there is value in asking people in crisis to talk about what’s happening and advocate for change. However, I think that that has to also be prefaced with humanity. Asking somebody that’s in the middle of their crisis, knowing that when you get done listening you go back to your comfortable situation but when they’re done, they’re more than likely not going back to something comfortable. They just took a moment out of their crisis and a moment out of their pain to also let you in for a minute. So, when you turn the switch off or the light off to listen to them, that person is still in there in a dark, dark place. So what I like about LIFT, is the notion that it is a priority to compensate people that are in that moment saying, ‘we’re providing opportunities for you to advocate, but we also respect the fact that you coming up here to be at this hearing or testimony where everybody else is sitting there on the clock, you’re not. You may have taken off work or you may have put into a deficit situation just to open your mouth.’
In so many ways, the way the system is set up, especially the public benefit system, the more you open your mouth, the less you get, so we shouldn’t expect for anybody that’s in the middle of their crisis to be gung-ho about telling their story. I definitely appreciate the fact when there is support, because there may be families that want to tell you their story, but they also might want to add perspectives so that our society, specifically decision makers, don’t discount what they say.
Do you have any last bits of advice or thoughts that you want to share?
I would just tell any new LIFT member: one day, one step, one task at a time. And if you can’t get to a task, can’t do a task, there is no shame in saying, ‘you know what? This isn’t happening today,’
I would also say that the coaches are on your side. The coach is not a teacher in that sense where you’re trying to get something like a grade out of them. That coach is not a representative of a government agency that’s going to be itemizing whether you brought in your driver’s license or your birth certificates or all these things. Your LIFT coach is literally on your side to be successful at whatever goal that you set for yourself. So, be open, try to be as honest as you can, and keep trying. If you go to a workshop and that workshop isn’t for you, it’s cool. Go to the next workshop. Show up even if you think you know everything they’re going to talk about, because I guarantee you it’s going to be something that they say in the workshop that is either going to spark something.