“Your Hand Is Forever on the Stove”: A Conversation with Bridgette “Bri” Simpson, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Barred Business

Bridgette “Bri” Simpson — co-founder and executive director of Barred Business, which works to expand opportunity and legal protections for justice-impacted people. Bri studied finance and accounting and dreamed of building a financial services firm. Instead, she spent ten years incarcerated in Georgia. When she came home in 2018, she struggled to find work, experienced homelessness, and encountered barriers to employment, housing, and opportunity. Those experiences helped lead to the creation of Barred Business in 2020. Since then, its work has expanded into reentry, entrepreneurship, voting rights, civic engagement, and public policy. In 2022, Barred Business helped lead the successful campaign to add criminal-history status to Atlanta’s nondiscrimination protections — work that has since helped inspire similar efforts elsewhere. In this episode, Bri talks about incarceration, reentry, stigma, and what she calls the permanent punishments that can follow people long after a sentence ends — and how she turned those experiences into a fight for dignity, opportunity, and full participation in community life.