Life through her eyes: Jasmine Kirk dreams of having house, car and career despite obstacles
The phone reads 6:50 a.m. as its final alarm goes off. A hand slips out from under the sheets next to the device and presses “stop” on the cool screen.
With that, the day has officially begun for Jasmine Kirk.
The 21-year-old’s morning routine is a near carbon copy of other working-class people. She puts on her work clothes and lanyard before stowing an Apple watch, portable charger and her lunch – two packs of uncooked chicken-flavored ramen – in a book bag. Like clockwork, a white Subaru parks outside of her two-bedroom town house. Kirk greets the driver, a co-worker, as they start their drive from Summit Lake to the Amazon warehouse on Romig Road in Akron.
Her next 10½ hours are spent picking items for delivery or stowing away incoming shipments broken up by two 30-minute mandatory breaks. The fast-paced workflow is hard on Kirk’s body, which can’t keep up with the computer’s demands. She already has been written up once for not moving fast enough and still isn’t sure how many of those it takes to lose her job.
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Within the warehouse walls she feels decades older, both from the body aches and write-ups, but outside the world observes her quite differently. Her 4-foot-11-inch frame causes others to assume that she is around 15 years old, a perception that leads to many glares when she and her daughter, Luna, 3, run errands together.
At 6 p.m., Kirk’s shift ends. Some days she and her co-worker work out at the gym before heading home, but today they simply retrace their path from the morning commute back to Kirk’s home. Luna’s father, who also lives with them, watches their daughter while Kirk is at work. She says they are no longer romantically involved because stepping across that boundary leads to a toxic relationship.
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The rest of the night is spent eating dinner, watching videos on her phone or spending time with Luna. If it’s been a good day, they may even watch one of the sappy romance movies Kirk loves. The working mother’s head hitting the pillow brings an end to her Sunday through Wednesday routine. Friday, she will sleep in until 7 a.m., watch TV for a few hours and work her second job at SRINA Tea House & Café in Kenmore for two hours before coming home and making dinner. If the weather is bad, she rides the bus to the tea shop. Otherwise, Kirk makes the 40-minute trek on the Summit Lake Trail and Kenmore Connector. Thursdays and Saturdays are her off days, often filled with watching anime, cooking dinner or therapy.
Kirk’s routine is not unusual for low-income Akron residents with more than one mouth to feed and two jobs to juggle.
Kirk is among nearly three dozen women trying to improve their lives through Jump On Board for Success (JOBS), a nonprofit organization in Kenmore providing young and at-risk mothers with free job skills training to help them achieve career-focused employment and self-sufficiency.
These mothers are often judged for things in and out of their control, whether it’s the neighborhood they live in, how often their baby cries or even how young they look. The Beacon Journal followed two of these women for five months to see life in Greater Akron through the eyes of mothers who are facing — and overcoming — many challenges.
Born into rough waters
Kirk’s life has been a series of shifts, with critical matters like housing, employment and caretakers changing every few months or, if she’s lucky, years.
Kirk remembers a tumultuous childhood.
At first, she and her sister were raised by their mother, who was convicted of possessing illicit drugs multiple times while they were growing up. According to police records from 2015, the sisters were physically abused and removed from their mother’s care.
Kirk’s great aunt and uncle were granted custody of them from second through fifth grade. Looking back, she recounts that stay as the only time she experienced stability and routine growing up. Once the sisters returned to their mother for sixth and seventh grade, they bounced from one dwelling to another.
The 21-year-old’s stepfather has acted as another parental figure throughout her life. Kirk and her sister lived with him from eighth through 11th grade, when they continued to experience unstable housing. Kirk describes him as a workaholic, much like she describes herself, and said he spent more time at construction sites than being home.
She had Luna during the fall of her senior year in high school and the two lived with Luna’s father until just before the child’s first birthday.
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Kirk’s work history includes a list of fast-food and warehouse positions with a call center thrown in. In 2021, she quit four jobs because she disliked the environment, management or pay scale. This isn’t even Kirk’s first stint at the Amazon warehouse, where she worked for nine months from late 2021 to mid-2022 before quitting because of her declining mental health.
It’s these experiences that make Kirk proud of where she and Luna have landed.
While her mother grew up moving from place to place, Luna has spent all three of her birthdays under the same roof. And despite her job history, Kirk has worked as a tea associate at SRINA for six months, notwithstanding the fluctuation in her hours since she started and the addition of a second job that is full time.
“I want to make sure that my daughter never has to experience being homeless. So, I've been working on keeping a roof over our heads and making sure we have food, and that's semi-hard due to the economy,” she said.
As someone with bipolar disorder, depression and anxiety, Kirk also considers the identity issues Luna may experience as a person of Black and Puerto Rican descent with few, if any, non-familial role models.
“I like to let her see me as strong, simply because she's interracial,” Kirk explained. “… It's hard to find interracial Black and Puerto Rican people that will help give her a leg up. So, I try to be that person that gives her that self-confidence. I tell her, ‘Oh, you're pretty. Your hair's nice,’ different things like that, that most kids don't hear. But it's like the pot calling the kettle black because if I don't feel those things, how can I say those things to my daughter?”
Right now, the friendly, curly haired little girl who welcomes guests with blankets and books and Sunny D doesn’t know the reason behind the compliments, that her mother feels like a hypocrite when uttering them or what “interracial” even means. She knows 3-year-old certainties: That she loves being held by her mom (though she’s getting too heavy for it) and that you say “happy birthday” to people around Thanksgiving, when she was born. She knows that watching “CoComelon” is fun, even though her mom dislikes it, and playing on their apartment’s laminate floor with tuxedo cat BMO is a great pastime.
Her upbringing and present way of life are also why Kirk has so many future plans. Education, housing, employment, transportation, Luna’s socialization – she has hopes attached to every single one.
But turning dreams into reality is no small undertaking.
Learning curves and benefits cliffs
Many of Kirk’s aspirations ride on her education and how far that will take her in terms of employment.
She graduated high school in 2020 but didn’t continue to college. Kirk chose motherhood over going back to school, which was made more daunting for her, an in-person learner, at the time because local universities and colleges were staying at least partially online because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kirk does have an Ohio Person in Charge for food safety and sanitation certification, thanks to SRINA and JOBS. Some SRINA employees, including Kirk, are required to complete JOBS’ 18-week culinary program, by the end of which students earn the certification.
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While in the program, Kirk learned proper knife skills, recipe reading comprehension and other skills any chef worth their salt must know on Tuesday evenings at Goss Memorial Church in Akron. Participants also get to take home food made in the classes.
In 2018, JOBS began collaborating with the Kenmore Neighborhood Alliance on a $150,000 grant from CareSource, a nonprofit health plan. The grant simultaneously expanded the culinary program and connected it to Kenmore Boulevard businesses like SRINA by subsidizing the wages of their employees in the culinary program.
“Our focus is to revitalize and not gentrify,” SRINA owner Monaqui Porter Young said. “If you’re going to revitalize in an underserved community, you’re basically saying, ‘I’m finding my workforce in this area,’ and that workforce will more than likely not come with certain skills that you need … In choosing Kenmore, the JOBS program allows us to have a partnership with the training and preparation of a workforce within that community.”
Kirk loves her job at SRINA, but her time there hasn’t been all smooth sailing.
Last year, Kirk’s sister told her that a family member had overdosed on fentanyl. The news impacted her work performance. After a meeting with management where both parties agreed it would be best to decrease her hours, she began working two to three shifts a week.
As someone with no savings, this quickly affected her ability to pay her then $219 rent to Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority (AMHA) as well as utilities. With the arrangement Kirk and Luna’s father have, he cares for Luna while Kirk works. If he were to get a job, it would complicate their day care situation. Kirk also considered picking up a second job at the risk of losing her food stamps, which would offset more of the additional money she’d be making.
This benefits cliff – the drop in public benefits that can occur with a small increase in earnings – is one of the many issues low-income families face and one that JOBS tries to help them navigate, according to JOBS Executive Director Jennifer Herrick.
“I'm a full-time mom and a part-time worker. But I need to be a full-time mom and a full-time worker so that I can afford the full-time mom position that I have,” Kirk said.
By September, she was three months late on her gas bill for the first time since moving into her apartment. In early October, she didn’t have enough money to pay her rent.
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“I’m not the type of person to be late on bills. I’m not the type of person to forget to pay bills,” she said. “I have so much trauma with my bills at my parents’ house not being paid that I made it my life’s goal to pay all of my bills.”
Kirk said she picked up shifts weekly at SRINA and completed a one-off job renovating a local Family Dollar. She hoped that it would lead to a position at the Kenmore Boulevard location. But after not hearing from the dollar store and with the next month’s bills staring her in the face, she returned to Amazon for a second job.
The young mom has contemplated going to college for her master’s in education and a minor in business – but only considers it to be a possibility once Luna starts school.
Building a better future for her daughter
Another of Kirk’s desires is to own a house that she can pass on to her children.
She’s not too picky about its location, square footage, color, amenities or just about anything else. Her only stipulation is a large backyard for her and Luna to camp out.
Today, Kirk and Luna live only a minute’s walk from the Summit Lake shore – across the lake from where a woman was shot while in her home last summer, and only half a mile from the docks near Summit Lake Community Center were the offending gun is thought to have been discharged. Similar incidents involving firearms are scattered across Summit Lake neighborhood, making it less than ideal real estate for camping during the warmer months.
But she likely won’t be staying much longer in the Summit Lakes Apartments complex.
The city is partnering with Akron Metropolitan Housing Authority (AMHA) to improve housing, neighborhood amenities and resident-focused services within Summit Lake. The housing portion of this mission includes the redevelopment of AMHA’s Summit Lake Apartments complex, where Kirk resides.
The process will involve temporarily relocating residents until the units have been demolished and rebuilt, according to Erin Myers, the housing authority’s real estate manager. Once that's completed, Kirk and her neighbors will be able to return to new apartments at their pre-refurbished affordability level, as well as some at a slightly higher level and market rate.
The city and AMHA intend to apply to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for Choice Neighborhoods implementation funding by the end of 2023. The earliest that residents may be asked to move from Summit Lake apartments is mid-2024, said Myers.
Through the relocation, Kirk hopes to be connected to a private landlord who would let her rent-to-own a house. It is unclear whether that would be a possibility through the AMHA program.
Kirk doesn’t have her license or a car. She hopes to remedy that using her income tax refund.
What's next for Jasmine Kirk?
One of Kirk’s pet peeves is family members questioning when she’s going to have another baby.
In late November, Kirk said that she thinks she had Luna too young and is not financially stable enough to raise a little brother or sister. At the time, she joked about getting a Baby Alive doll to make the questions stop but knows they won’t until she has a baby boy.
“Everyone (at Thanksgiving) kept asking me, ‘When are you and your baby daddy going to get back together and have a baby?’ Kirk recounted. “So far (Luna’s fraternal grandparents) have so many granddaughters, they want a boy.”
Kirk does intend to have children until she conceives a boy. At the start of the new year, she decided that she is ready to have more children and started planning her and Luna’s father’s next pregnancy, which she hopes will be conceived in October and result in another little girl named Kora. The mom also intends to save $200 a month until she starts maternity leave.
“I am looking forward to (this) year,” Kirk said. “I have a lot of big plans. I’m just altogether looking forward to it.”
Contact Beacon Journal reporter Tawney Beans at tbeans@gannett.com and on Twitter @TawneyBeans.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Young Akron mom has dreams of providing stable home for her daughter
