After years of offering second chance employment.

Rob Perez of Diva Kitchen says he thought he knew it all when it came to the challenges faced by those reentering society after addiction or incarceration.

But a reentry simulation by the Kentucky Department of Corrections opened his eyes.

Now he's helping educate others about the hardships faced by those in reentry.

By hosting his own simulations.

We've been employing people that have a past for over six years, and I went through one of the reentry simulations thinking I knew everything, but I really didn't understand all that people had to go through when just trying to get back into the community after jail or addiction.

This is the first simulation and we're setting up a series of them so that we can get people that currently may not have the understanding that we were lucky enough to have.

I work at Natalie's Sisters, which is a nonprofit that kind of helps women who pertain to this situation.

So I thought that I had kind of a better understanding of it, and I was sorely mistaken.

It was a lot harder than I thought.

The first week I walked around like five times in a circle because I couldn't find, you know, where I needed to go for work.

And I was like, in real life, you know, that's absolutely something that they go through.

We needed to have a bus pass for every place that we went, which is also something that I deal with on a daily basis at work.

But I didn't think it had as big of an impact as it does in real life.

When I was reviewing an application and weeding out people to interview because they had gaps in their employment and I didn't know how many barriers as an employer I had put up.

We all say that people, when they get out of jail or out of recovery, they need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

The reality of it is, is with the private sector decides that they're going to put barriers on jobs, on housing and opportunities every day.

And it becomes so hard to just make ends meet that people go back to addiction, go back to jail, because it's just not possible.

People think that getting an ID is super easy.

Getting your Social Security card super easy, but you can't do any of that if you don't have an address.

If you're coming straight out of jail, you don't have an address, you've got to start paying rent.

But to pay rent, you have to have a job.

To have a job, you have to have a house.

And it's just it's a cyclical type of thing.

I'm hoping that people that have jobs to offer have housing, to offer opportunity, ease, that they reevaluate, just say no.

When asked if they can give opportunities to people with a past.

It's easy to look at somebody and say, you know, they were incarcerated.

Did you know they did this to themselves?

But I think having that empathy and looking at it from their point of view is a big step in being able to acknowledge that these kind of issues do happen and the best way to fix them.

Rob Perez says Diva Kitchen plans to host more reentry simulations in the future.

Once confirmed, those dates will be announced on social media.