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New Parents in Recovery Find ‘Family’ at Louisville Nonprofit

The smell of burgers and the sound of laughing children drifted through the air on an early June evening at a Germantown church, where members and employees of ChooseWell Communities greeted one another with hugs and smiles.

At one table sat Joseph Bond and Brandon Price, both single fathers of young kids. The pair met one another leaving the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections and have become best friends, first through going to treatment at The Healing Place together before joining ChooseWell's recovery program. Price helps Bond care for his weeks-old daughter Brayleigh, and Bond spends time with Price's son, Baylor.

It's a type of support that's become common for people who find ChooseWell, a nonprofit that supports parents in recovery, especially those with children under 5.

Since its founding in 2014, ChooseWell has become a family for those in its program. Members babysit each others' kids, help each other move and cook for one another. Many are neighbors, living on the same street or in the same apartment building.

"When they leave those (90-day treatment) programs, they really need this community support for several years," said Kim Mascaro, who co-founded ChooseWell with Stephanie Barnett. "It's not a one-and-done kind of thing."

Every member must undergo a 90-day treatment program before joining, and each "class" of members must have some sort of recovery program they are working through. After a couple of years, members graduate — but many remain entrenched in the community or even become ChooseWell employees themselves.

Bond and Price say the organization has already become instrumental in their lives. Soon after Bond left the hospital with newborn Brayleigh, ChooseWell members were at his apartment carrying donated baby supplies and setting up a pack-and-play. Brayleigh's crib even came from a ChooseWell member who lives across the hall from Bond.

For Price, the ChooseWell board helped repair a car, allowing him to commute to a job. "There was one point where I was finishing treatment and my mom gave me a car," Price said in Bond's living room while burping Brayleigh. "It was a hand-me-down vehicle so it needed some work done to it, and transportation was a huge deal. And they pulled together and was able to help me get the car into the shop. That was what kick-started my employment."

ChooseWell aims to provide people with "recovery capital," or internal and external resources used to sustain recovery, said executive director Leigh Ann Yost.

That includes a connection to affordable housing, thanks to Martha Diebold, who's been connected with the group since its early years.

"We had very few landlords that wanted our families," many of whom have subsidized housing vouchers, Barnett said. "And so she literally went and started buying apartments. She's creating the village of ChooseWell people in these little clusters of neighborhoods when very few other people would or could."

ChooseWell is currently working with about 30 different families who have about 67 children. In June, Louisville Metro Council members approved awarding the nonprofit more than $550,000 in opioid settlement funds at Mayor Craig Greenberg's recommendation, allowing it to soon expand to serve 40 additional families. It also recently launched the KYnship Creates art program, which aims to help members return to the workforce and raise money for the organization.

"Anything we need that goes on, we can reach out to ChooseWell, and if they don't have the answer, then they're gonna help you figure it out," Price said. "There's that insurance on knowing that someone's got your back. That's huge."