LOVE AND CHARITY –

March 5, 2021 – They recommended another facility several hours away, but by the time they arrived, her daughter was in withdrawal. Again, the hospital didn’t know how to help. “I was like, “What is going on? How is it that two hospitals did not see this as an emergency?’ “ Ladd says. “I just held her, cried with her, all of the things. As a mom, I was angry.”

Eventually her daughter entered a residential treatment program, and she’s been in recovery since. But the crisis was a turning point for Ladd, who vowed to make it easier for people suffering from addiction to find help — and to find ways to prevent the problem in the first place. In 2018, after leaving her corporate job, she founded the Maury County Prevention Coalition, a group dedicated to re-educating the community on addiction in Tennessee, where more than 2,000 people died of a drug overdose in 2019. 

“We’ve grown beyond the days of just saying no,” Ladd says. “We need empathy and compassion at every stage of the process.” The coalition has offered parenting classes for those in recovery, organized town hall events about addiction and created a task force to rethink the way local hospitals care for drug-addicted mothers and babies. “Kimberly has a courageous vulnerability,” says Douglas Chapman, a Maury County juvenile court judge who has worked with Ladd through the coalition. “Her passion and her story draw people in. She’s someone who is doing this work from a love perspective.”

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