The Job That Changed Everything, Honored My Lived Experience, and Almost Lost Me Anyway

Why hiring people with lived experience requires more than belief in the ethics

At the Texas Veterans Commission, a Navy veteran took a pen to my résumé and crossed out my master's degree. She drew lines through my professional jobs, too.

"Once they see your credentials," she said, "they'll assume you'll leave as soon as you find a better job."

I had just been released from prison after nearly six years. I took the bus every day to the workforce center. I attended weekly job fairs where they bluntly refused to hire anyone with a felony record. Months later, I finally found a job, nine dollars an hour sorting used smartphones at a warehouse. I wore scrubs with no pockets. My electronic monitor set off the metal detector every morning, exposing my criminality to my coworkers.

I had never been more grateful for a job.

A few years later, I was in a different world entirely. I had moved into advocacy work at an organization that believed in hiring people with lived experience. The ethics were right. The mission was right. Leadership said all the right things.

Two years after my release from prison, I relapsed and contemplated taking my own life.

Here is what happened. Leadership at my employer had shifted. I felt criticized. I felt accused of disloyalty. Around the same time, I was deeply involved in a campaign to pass a local Ban the Box ordinance, a policy I believed in the way only someone who has been turned away from dozens of job fairs can believe in it. My employer vetoed our involvement, citing the need for business association support on other campaigns.

To the coalition of activists I had become close to, many of them also people with lived experience who had become my post-prison community, I became a sellout. The rejection detonated a childhood abandonment trigger I had spent forty years avoiding. I bought cocaine. I stayed up all night. When it ran out, I could not bear the shame I knew was coming, and I began to consider ending my life. I am alive today because I reached out to my girlfriend and a trusted friend, and they came for me. They refused to let me sink into shame.

I do not tell this story to indict my former employer. The people there were doing a job with real pressures and constraints of their own. I tell it because the current conversation about lived-experience hiring keeps missing something.

Most organizations that hire people with histories like mine genuinely believe in the ethics. They have read the research. They use the language. They want to do this. And many of them are, without knowing it, setting up both their organizations and their employees to fail.

The ethical commitment is a starting point, not an endpoint.

Unsupportive supervision is not a minor HR matter for someone with my history. It is a loaded weapon. A routine shift in organizational strategy can become, for an employee whose community credibility is what the organization hired them for, a crisis leadership never intended. Early disclosure of a struggle has to be safer than silence, and that trust has to be earned before it is needed. Policies for relapse, hospitalization, and crisis have to exist before the crisis, not after.

None of this is obvious from the outside. None of it appears in job descriptions. All of it is the difference between employees who thrive and employees whose wellbeing is put at risk.

For six years after my release from prison, I worked to create the opportunity I had needed. I helped write and pass legislation that opened occupational licensing, reduced housing barriers for people with records, and built employer support for second-chance hiring. I worked to change culture at every table I could find. Today, I train people with lived experience in leadership, helping them advance in their careers and carry their own visions into the world. I have seen what it takes to make this work, and I have seen what it costs when organizations mean well but are not ready. That is why I am passionate about helping organizations get this right.

I wrote a book about this journey called The Path of Rocks and Thorns: Leadership Lessons from a Prison Cell. My colleague Laura LeBlanc and I now work with organizations that want to move from ethical commitment to actual readiness: the supervision practices, policies, and organizational culture that make hiring people with lived experience a durable success for everyone involved.

If your organization already hires people with lived experience, or wants to, we would welcome a conversation.

Doug Smith doug@d-degree.com

Laura LeBlanc lauranelmore@gmail.com