Cassie Reed and her two young children had just moved from a domestic violence shelter into a third-floor apartment in Spokane, Washington, when she spotted a soon-to-open Head Start preschool on the building's ground floor.
Much of Reed's first three decades of life had been shaped by abuse and neglect: first, she says, at the hands of her biological mother, then in foster care and, when she became an adult, in a series of romantic relationships. She had lost custody of three older children a decade earlier, in part because she lacked stable housing. By March 2022, when she had finally landed an apartment in a transitional housing program, she had lost all faith in herself.
