LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX NEWS) — NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. — Jessica Barnett knows what it is like to need help. Now, she is working to provide it to others.
Barnett is a house manager at a sober living home in Nicholasville, where she supports people navigating recovery from addiction.
“I’m just trying to help everybody that comes in the door,” Barnett said.
Her role today is a dramatic change from where she found herself last year.
Barnett said she had battled addiction for years.
“I was using, dealing, I was doing all the things that I shouldn’t be doing,” she said.
Barnett was arrested and jailed in April 2025. While incarcerated at the Jessamine County Detention Center, she learned about programs available to inmates and eventually decided to take advantage of them.
“One day I was like, ‘I’m gonna get out of this room and I’m gonna go to these programs,’” Barnett said.
One of those programs connected her with Shepherd’s House Program Director Kate Holway. Confused and frustrated, Barnett posed this question to Holway while incarcerated.
“Is there anything beyond this (being in prison)?” Holway recalled Barnett asking.
“And I said, ‘Yeah, but you have to work for it,’ and then she came to believe,” Holway said.
Barnett also worked with Jessamine County Detention Center Re-entry Coordinator Robert Barbosa, whose approach centers on giving inmates tools to succeed after their release.
“We’re about empowerment, not enablement,” Barbosa said.
Barbosa encouraged Barnett to consider a sober living program and asked her to complete an intake call.
That call ultimately helped connect Barnett with a program led in part by Clear View Behavioral Health co-founder David Mason.
Barnett was released from jail Aug. 6, 2025. Mason says her progress since then has been significant.
“It didn’t look good at the beginning, right? But now here we are,” Mason said before becoming emotional. “I’m just so grateful.”
Barnett now runs one of Clear View Behavioral Health’s nine sober living homes, putting her in a position to help others facing some of the same struggles she once confronted.
For Barnett, that opportunity has become part of her own recovery.
“The reward you get from servicing others is unexplainable,” she said.
Barnett’s journey is one example of the work being done by organizations and programs in Jessamine County to help people transition from incarceration and addiction into recovery. Many organizations, including the Jubilee Jobs of Lexington Reentry Academy are working in Nicholasville, representing a major part of that network of support.
