They pay $500 a month for this place. Each month Edie uses the Cash App on her phone - the only formal bank account she has - to withdraw funds and Brandon walks the cash across the street to the landlord, who is also his barber and friend.
I ask: what do you like best about your home?
“That it’s ours,” Brandon said.
Edie agrees. They don’t own it, but this isn’t an own vs. rent distinction.
“It’s ours” means something to someone for a family that’s experienced homelessness.
It means having a place to go.
I interviewed Edie and Brandon during my visit to Dayton with the Kettering Foundation to explore the work of their Dayton Democracy Fellows. They live on the East End of Dayton - one of the hardest hit areas of the opioid epidemic. “Of the 566 deaths in Montgomery County [Dayton] in 2017, half of them were in East Dayton,” says Jan Lepore-Jentleson, the Executive Director of the East End Neighborhood Development Corporation. “Our staff would get called that there was a person down, and then we’d grab our Narcan and run over,” The Ruskin School, one of the local elementary schools, is kitty-corner to an apartment building that would regularly have people leave in body bags, which the children would see.
The year 2017 was the “worst year in history for this community,” says Jan, though things have gotten better since then. She credits the widespread availability of Narcan, as well as collaborative efforts between non-profits, the city, and everyday citizens with making an improvement. But for Brandon and Edie, and many neighbors that face similar challenges, “better” is still incredibly difficult.
Brandon and Edie explain that they have both stopped using drugs, and they are a year-and-a-half clean, which they are very proud of. They credit their therapist, their support group, and their own determination and love for their kids with making this possible. It took some time and some false starts - and a rock bottom incident that pulled their family apart and put their kids in foster care - before things could improve to where they are now. Edie is the sole income earner, she holds a regular job now as a shift manager at Panera Bread. This is one of the best jobs she’s ever had, she tells me, speaking glowingly of her coworkers and her willingness to help them out with their side work if they’re moving slowly or just need a hand. Her previous general manager would sometimes call shift manager meetings, and those conversations were the closest thing to a community that Edie has felt part of in her adult life.
Brandon doesn’t have paid work. He has struggled to find a position he could keep for a stretch of time, and they have no reliable child care option. (Until recently, they had no car, but recently they received a donated one.) So he stays home with their three boys, the youngest of whom is 2 years old. While in foster care, the boys thrived at the school they attended, making friends and joining the football and basketball teams. But after reuniting with their parents they were no longer in-district and Brandon and Edie didn’t feel comfortable sending their kids to the local school. The older boys have recently started online homeschooling through Dayton Public Schools.
Edie says she prefers this arrangement where Brandon stays home because there is no one she trusts to watch her children while she works. She recalls when her middle son was in daycare (where she and Brandon would walk over five miles to drop him off and then go to work at a hotel).
“I just got a vibe from the lady [working there] that she was lazy,” Edie said. “I came outside and my son was crying and she was yelling, ‘be quiet.’ She acted like I didn’t hear that. When I went back in after I heard her yelling, she said he was just crying because he dropped his pacifier, but he doesn’t take a pacifier. I’m scared more than anything.”
One thing Edie and Brandon are both scared of - what they continue to come back to in our conversations - is that other people are judging them. They’ve had rough patches in their lives - a stretch of time without a home, where they stayed with a relative who was involved with drugs and a “scary” lifestyle. A time where they were separated from their kids, and then shamed by the hospital when they went to get help. They have been shamed about jobs they’ve lost, and even have shame about the school situation, where it seems like there is no good option for their children.
Never enough to keep their head above water
If Edie could have a magic wand and make everything better, what would she wish for?
“Fewer stipulations on getting help,” she says. She would accept more help for their family: SNAP and Medicaid benefits, bill payments, kids in school, but it’s incredibly difficult to navigate and too many wrong turns have left Edie and Brandon exhausted from the process. They do the “right” things and it is never enough to keep their head above water. Many people that they grew up with are in prison, dead, addicted, or disconnected from their children. They have been together 23 years - since they were 16 and 17 years old - and it seems like no matter how hard they try to do right, it is not enough.
Brandon wishes for more recreation centers, “So my kids would have some place to go.” During the day, he and the boys stay inside or go to an aunt’s house, they don’t want to frequent the parks nearby because of the zombies and the other neighbors whom they are both suspicious of. “I’d make it easier for families like myself to get housing too,” he adds. He recalls a visit to a neighborhood housing program and the woman working there explained he needed to send an email to request assistance.
“But I’m here now,” Brandon explained, shaking his head in exasperation when retelling the story. “I could see the woman, she was right there, but she was like, ‘no, send an email.’” He never got a response.
I point out the new Head Start facility opening up half a mile from their home, on a plot of land that used to be the Lincoln Hill elementary school. It’s a $13 million dollar facility, with a community space and health clinic and the type of investment in high quality child care that has the ability to be transformative for communities. The “two-generation collaborative” is how Jan Lepore-Jentleson of East End Neighborhood Development describes it - referring to the wrap-around services that benefit both the parents and children. Lepore-Jentleson has been working with Miami Valley Child Development Centers (MVCDC) on building the MVCDC Lincoln Hill Head Start in the neighborhood for over a decade, it was her organization that bought the land from Dayton Public Schools and sold it to MVCDC to construct it. East End Neighborhood Development’s work has also been included as one of the Kettering Foundation’s Dayton Democracy Fellows. According to Berta Velilla, the CEO of MVCDC, the MVCDC Lincoln Hill Head Start will have room for 250 students, with a ribbon cutting in March 2025, a soft opening in April, and then be fully operational in July 2025.
So if the MVCDC Lincoln Hill Head Start can offer their youngest a spot, would Brandon and Edie send them there?
They nod. There is an allure to the Head Start program - the bright new construction, adjacent garden space, the idea of a community, the knowledge that teachers there will be fully staffed, trained, and supported. This has a stronger appeal than the previous daycare experience Edie referred to where there seemed like too many babies and not enough adults.
If their youngest goes to Head Start, it may mean Brandon can work again. A second income coming in means fewer trips to the food pantry, and a better ability to pay off their bills through the Percentage of Income Payment Plan, or PIPP. Their fervent wish is to move to a nicer home, “a house with a white picket fence,” and a neighborhood with fewer “zombies” walking around.
Such changes might be possible.
On our way out of the neighborhood that day, one of the “zombies” is passed out, his body lying in the street.
Brandon and Edie are committed to raising their boys in a better situation than they were raised, even though both grew up impoverished, Brandon in one of Dayton’s housing projects and Edie in the East End, where they live now. They aren’t married, but plan to be married once they are “settled.” Brandon wants to wait until they are more stable and settled, but they both wonder what it will take. They are happy to have their children out of foster care, but also working every day to hang on (“maintainin’'” says Brandon) and have been doing so for most of their lives.
“It won’t affect me at all”
Have you ever voted? I ask. Both shake their heads. They have no space in their life for civic engagement, for building a community, and both distrust many of their neighbors and relatives who have often judged them and undermined them when what they needed was unconditional love and support. And voting? Why would they even consider doing that?
“I’m not into politics,” Edie tells me. Brandon says he doesn’t care who wins, “it won’t affect me at all.”
The only people who care about the election, Brandon tells me, are the rich people. They’re the ones whose decisions matter.
I point out to them that their votes - in a swing state like Ohio - actually matter a great deal. Far more so than my own vote, which is cast in Maryland, which in 2024 would be considered a “solidly blue” state, even with a competitive senate race. Voting is the great equalizer, rich and poor all get the same say.
They both shake their heads again. “I’m just not into politics,” Edie reiterates, as if politics were a hobby or sports team that one opted into.
There is one issue Edie has an opinion on: abortion. She’s seen the ads for candidates who don’t support abortion rights and feels that is wrong to control a woman’s body, “especially in cases like rape,” she says.
Abortion rights do figure prominently into Ohio’s election this fall. Does that change their mind about voting? No.
What about a ballot being mailed to their house to fill out? Does that make it easier? Doesn’t matter.
What about when they wake up on Nov. 6, will they have an opinion one way or another about who is President? Not really.
For Brandon and Edie, a lifetime of trauma and distress has made distancing themselves entirely from the political process a seem to be a better option than seeking to engage with it. Perhaps one part of it is not wanting to get their hopes up. Another part is feeling like they don’t belong - “politics” is for someone else. And yet another aspect is that the concerns they face everyday are really about what is going on that day. Even though many of the policies that will be decided in the state and national elections will directly affect them - from minimum wage increases to expanded Medicaid benefits to infrastructure investments like the Head Start building they admit looks appealing, something that “might happen someday” does not figure into their daily calculations.
I wonder, as someone who writes often about policy and how it affects people, why it is that people don’t know just how much government intervention matters. A New York Times story interviewing voters also reported on this phenomenon, that some voters “felt so ignored by politicians that they have disengaged from the process altogether.”
Maybe this is part of our larger failure as a country. “Our willingness, and sometimes delight, in shaming people who need support most has meant that those who stand to benefit cannot see themselves as part of the process,” said Elizabeth Gish, a senior program officer with the Kettering Foundation, whose work in Dayton makes politics, democracy, and civic engagement more inclusive. “Our goal is not to tell people, ‘Oh hey you should get more involved,’ but rather to build accessible on-ramps to participation and engagement that makes sense to them and where they can experience the benefits of engagement first hand.”
I tell Brandon and Edie I am going to share their story. They seem surprised people would care about it. Neither seems to understand why I keep asking about voting. There are more pressing things going on in their lives. “Besides it won’t affect me,” Brandon tells me again.
The next day I come to Panera Bread where Edie works. She is actively engaging with her coworkers, one of whom tells us a joke at the register and they all start laughing.
What if she knew that voting could change the lives of her coworkers? I had asked Edie. Would that make it worth it, or give her a stake in the outcome?
Edie is quiet, she doesn’t answer right away. This is the aspect of her life that gives her the most engagement with a positive group of people. This job has allowed her to shine, even as she comes home to a place that doesn’t yet have a white picket fence, or even as her kids are no longer in the school they loved, she can still pay the rent.
But her answer hasn’t changed. She tells me again, for what must be the zillionth time that I’m asking her only to get the same answer: “I’m just not into politics.”
Rebecca Gale is a writer with the Better Life Lab at New America, and has written extensively about child care, work, gender and well-being. Read more of her work on Substack: rebeccagale.substack.com
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