Five mornings a week for the past few months, Jalisa Bennett runs through the halls of a Kansas City homeless shelter with a singular mission — find someone with car keys willing to drive her to work.
“I go up and down, running around this whole building. Everybody who comes past with car keys (I’m asking), ‘Hey, you want to make $10?’” Bennett said. “I’m going to work, and I’m going to make it there on time.”
Bennett, a single mother of two young boys, arrived in town nearly two years ago after leaving an unsafe domestic situation. Money was tight, but at first she found a way to get by. Since then she’s navigated a sequence of setbacks that led her to living in a shelter. Through it all, though, she kept working…