Amy came to Pathways to Employment in August 2023. Several months before that, she had made the decision to remove herself and her seven children from a home environment stuck in a cycle of domestic violence and addiction. She found temporary housing through another community organization, but needed to find a job that could help provide a stable home for her family. Her job as a retail associate at Neighborhood Thrift provided her with opportunities to address her barriers to employment, earn a paycheck and work through some of the challenging patterns she had been struggling to overcome in her personal life. 

Amy says that the biggest growth experiences in her time at Neighborhood Thrift have centered around learning to use her voice and face her fears. She acknowledges that when she came to PTE, she was scared by the unfamiliar situation: it was only the second job she had ever held, and she had become the sole provider in her family. But it was also a place where everyone seemed to normalize talking about their fears, so that Amy felt comfortable acknowledging the aspects of the job that challenged or scared her, as well as getting support from her coworkers in overcoming her fears at work and at home. 

In August 2024, Amy was finally able to move her family into their own home, and she is almost a year into her sobriety journey. Amy recognizes how far she has come in the past year, saying that for her, “success means not giving up, and choosing to continue to move forward and grow.” Her next goal for herself is to get her driver’s license.