Renee Cooper Turns Pain Into Purpose
By Meg Hale Brunton
Community Health Worker (CHW) and person in recovery, Renee Cooper has used her own experiences through trauma, addiction and incarceration to help others find hope and recovery. “Because I’ve been there and done that, I am able to use my lived experiences to help lead someone out of darkness,” she says. Cooper also advocates for redemptive opportunities (jobs, housing, government support) for felons who have served their time through a statewide alliance called the NC Second Chance Alliance.
As a child, Cooper always aspired to become a nurse. While her recollections of her childhood in Pennsylvania were happy, she remembers witnessing her father’s struggle with alcoholism and the dysfunctional relationship it created between him and Cooper's mother. When Cooper was eleven, after a particularly ugly fight between her parents, her mother moved her and her brother to North Carolina. Though she was angry at her father for years, Cooper says she now understands what he was going through. “Now I know why. They’re trying to fill a hole that can’t be filled,” she says of addicts. “I had to go through it firsthand to have compassion.”
Cooper got her first nursing assistant certification while she was still in high school. By 19, she had also earned her second CNA and her phlebotomy licensure. After marrying her high school boyfriend, Cooper they started to party every weekend. “We were not equally yoked and partied a lot,” she says of her first husband, saying that she started drinking when she was with him. The couple eventually divorced, but the bad habits she had learned remained. Cooper then moved to Hickory.
An introvert, Cooper found drinking alcohol helped bring her out of her shell. Soon she was drinking every night. “I was really lost,” she remembers. In addition to working at the local hospital, she worked at bars where she drank on the job. Eventually, Cooper lost her CNA job. Then, she started experimenting with drugs. Cooper ended up being arrested and was sent to jail for eight months. Following that, she went through several years of active addiction and risky behavior, before returning to prison for five months while she was four months pregnant. “I just prayed, ‘Please let me get out of here and have somewhere for me and my baby to go.’”
Luckily, the baby girl, Julionna, was born nine days past her due date, after Cooper was out of prison and staying at a treatment house called Mary Benson House. “I had everything I could need. They had a crib, diapers, and clothes!” she says of the facility, where she stayed for fourteen months. The staff at Mary Benson House helped her find an apartment, a job, a church, and helped her to join Celebrate Recovery, a support group for people in recovery.
In 2016, after her mentor Pam Coppedge recommended her for the job, Cooper was made medical records coordinator for the Neil Dobbins Center. “I was so down on myself because of what happened,” Cooper says, stating that returning to the healthcare industry helped to restore her self esteem. She also met her husband Philip, the love of her life, who used to work at the center and was also in recovery. The couple has been married six years, have a baby girl together, and recently welcomed a new grandbaby. “We have a blessed and blended family. I gained three bonus daughters. They’re just the best kids and they have all blessed my heart so much.”
In 2018, Cooper took a job as support supervisor with the Caiyalynn Burrell Child Crisis Center. From there, she became a CHW with UNETE. In 2022, Cooper was delighted to get to work directly with patients again when she joined the team at Hopscotch Primary Care. “They gave me a second chance,” she says of the facility. As team lead, she also does all the training and hiring of the CHWs at Hopscotch, as well as caring for her patients. “This is my passion! What I love to do is help people.”
Cooper feels blessed to have a husband who is just as committed to giving back to the community as she is. “He has a heart for helping people and I do too!” she says of Philip. He operates his own non-profit, Operation Gateway, to help system-impacted people re-enter society and prevent them from returning to prison. Cooper has been a peer support for six years and a CHW for over two years. She also recently applied for her advanced level CHW certification. They both volunteer with the Asheville Dream Center, and have recently started a Celebrate Recovery group at their church, Revol. “Anything that we can do to help. We’re all about social justice and Jesus.”
Last April, the couple made the trip to Raleigh to lobby on behalf of the Second Chances Alliance. Cooper, herself, even got to address the NC lawmakers in favor of adopting a forgiveness policy, or a certificate of relief for felons. “It just flowed. It wasn’t jumbled up, or stuttery. I spoke truth to power,” she recalls of overcoming her introversion to make her speech. In it, she recounted how hard it was trying to restart her life as a felon with a new baby. “No one will rent to me because of my background. As a single mom, I couldn’t get food stamps because of my felonies.”
Now, proud to be ten years clean and sober, Cooper hopes that her work will help remove some of the stigma surrounding addiction. “It just takes somebody breaking the silence,” she says. “I’ve got a lot of obstacles and barriers that I had to overcome and it is possible. So, I want to make sure that you can get through it too. I feel like the Lord knew I was gonna help others turn their pain into purpose. I give Him the glory!”
