The Ladies of Promise addiction treatment center is expanding its location in west Louisville to provide low-income housing and more services for the community.
Plans for the five-story building at the corner of West Market and 22nd Street show 52 residential units, with both one and two-bedroom options.
Ladies of Promise president Aileen Bryant-Wales announced plans at a groundbreaking on Wednesday. “We want to meet the community where they are and want to provide, desperately, to care for themselves and their families,” Bryant-Wales said.
Planned services and resources include a 24-hour daycare, community kitchen, a laundry facility and library.
Bryant-Wales said the space will also offer education and counseling services.
“We plan to aid in the continued growth of this community,” Bryant-Wales said. “We want to offer options previously out of reach, unattainable or unknown to the West End community.”
The new building will add to the services already offered at the recovery center. The center operates residential, outpatient and transitional living programs in addition to therapy and psychiatric services.
People don’t have to be enrolled in a Ladies of Promise recovery program to live in the building; additionally, people will not need to be residents to access community services.
Organization leaders hope this new building will work to address decades-long issues of disparities for West End communities.
“It’s time that the people in this area learn and believe in their inherent worth as human beings and that worth transcends the circumstances they were born into, the area that they grew up or call home and the color of their skin,” CEO Catherine Stone-Hahn said.
Gov. Andy Beshear attended the groundbreaking and said the Ladies of Promise give a guiding example of how individuals can improve society.
“I believe our best days can be ahead and that we can be generations that change everything for everybody that comes after us, but the lesson we got to take into it, is the lesson the Ladies of Promise teach and what COVID has taught us,” Beshear said. “It’s that everybody matters, that everybody counts and that we got to lift up everybody.”
The woman who will oversee construction of the new facility understands that. Alisia Richardson went through a Ladies of Promise treatment program.
Richardson spoke with Bryant-Wales about her construction company, ARGC Construction Group, during her treatment. Bryant-Wales made a deal with Richardson to talk business once she completed the program.
“And so our conversation led to her letting me know she bought this lot and I said ‘Let’s make this happen,” Richardson said.
The funding for the lot and initial construction came from community partners, according to Richardson. She didn’t disclose who those partners were.
The new facility is slated to open for use by late 2023.
