Women On The Rise

At the time of our interview, 29-year-old Ajaunae is a supervising manager at BJs in northern Virginia. She’s living at a shelter and saving to secure an apartment for herself and her 6-year-old son Justin. She’s optimistic, self-aware and disarmingly witty. She’s also a recovering drug addict and is emerging, with the help of Together We Bake, from a decade of sheer hell.

Imagine going through a program aimed at providing a second chance, and quickly discovering your second chance is becoming a member of the program’s staff. That’s what happened to 2018 Together We Bake grad Teresa, who today is a full-time TWB production assistant.

When everything’s coming up roses, it’s easy to fall into a mindset of “us and them” with regard to those who have a criminal record. But as a recent Together We Bake graduate who committed a white-collar crime in a desperate ploy to escape battery at the hand of the common-law father of her children learned, the line between the two sides of the law is often more tenuous than we realize.

Sometimes the hardest thing for us to do is trust enough to let someone help, especially when we’ve made ourselves vulnerable before and gotten burned. Lilly Monroe came to Together We Bake in the spring after she served a four-month jail sentence and narrowly avoided additional time for breaking her probation. Skeptical that anyone would have her best interest at heart, she spent weeks resisting the people and the process before summoning the courage to commit.

“I still remember him calling my father. I remember his exact words: ‘Come pick up your daughter now. I’m going to kill her.’ I guess he’d finally gotten everything from me he wanted.“ Battered, exploited and deep into a crack addiction, Rebecca had crash-landed at the bottom of a downward spiral of poor decisions and unsteady relationships. The last stop was Philadelphia, living with a man who promised the moon but instead got her hooked her on drugs, tracked her every move, kept her sequestered and at his whim exposed her to violence and pornography. X rays taken of Rebecca after she was recovered would reveal several broken ribs, a broken tailbone, and crushed shoulder blades. That was November 2014.

Although the majority of Together We Bake graduates are transitioning back into society from the corrections system, the need for a second chance takes many forms. Meet Shannon Gray-Chappell, a graduate of TWB’s spring 2016 class. The 40-year-old wife and mother of two worked for the federal government for 17 years before, as she tells it, “I had a nervous breakdown.”