‘There’s Nothing More Urgent Than Freedom’

SMU alumna works to support incarcerated mid- and post-imprisonment

Motivated by her mother’s incarceration, Brittany Barnett started nonprofit Girls Embracing Mothers about 10 years ago to use her experience to empower others in similar situations.

“That nonprofit is to empower young girls with mothers in prison to step and dream their biggest dreams and fulfill their highest potential,” the SMU Dedman School of Law alumna said.

The nonprofit partners with women’s prisons in Texas for girls to visit their moms every month and hosts healing justice sessions, empowerment workshops, and an annual summer camp. 

She’s also behind the Buried Alive Project and the Manifest Freedom Foundation.

She co-founded the Buried Alive Project in 2017 with two of her clients, Sharanda Jones and Corey Jacobs, who were serving life sentences under outdated federal drug laws. The trio’s nonprofit works to free people who are serving unjust drug sentences by providing pro bono legal representation.

They’ve so far helped free 62 people.

“There’s no parole in the federal system, so life is life,” Barnett said. “This work was literally life saving for dozens of people and their families.”

Through that work, she met brilliant incarcerated people and realized “we rescue them from prison to restore them to poverty.” Barnett remembered her clients talking about their aspirations.

“From there, I launched the Manifest Freedom Foundation, where we work to empower entrepreneurs and creatives who have been impacted by the criminal legal system by providing them with capital, access to resources, and a community of people,” she said.

The Manifest Freedom Foundation has provided $560,000 in grants. 

She helped Jones fund her food truck, Fed Up, through this initiative. Other investments have included funding films and book projects.

Barnett left corporate law in 2016 to devote herself to nonprofit work, but still utilizes what she learned on the job.

“I’m just always pondering my highest and best use as a human on this Earth, and I’m understanding that highest and best use evolves over time,” Barnett said. “Where I’m at now in the evolution is bringing my corporate skills and merging them with my passion to transform unjust systems and really wanting to help people with economic empowerment.”

Barnett was 22 years old when her mom went to prison.

“I can’t imagine being 9 or 10 and my mom going to prison,” she said. “It’s devastating to have any loved one incarcerated, but I can say from firsthand experience that it’s a primal wound when it’s your mom.”

Barnett’s memoir, A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom, follows her journey growing up in rural east Texas and her mom’s drug addiction that led to her incarceration.

“I said, ‘If I’m going to write this book, I have to do it and tell the story in all of its authenticity,’ so I wrote the book to tell the truth … about the injustice that bleeds through the American legal system,” she said.

Barnett believes “there’s nothing more urgent than freedom.”