Model and Strategy
We exist to end mass incarceration from the inside out. That said, we don’t deal with laws and systems, we deal with the healing of human beings navigating those systems and the tensions of gang and street life. Their transformation, their ability to cope with stress, develop resilience, and build a better life for themselves in the most challenging of circumstances – inside or outside of prison – is what drives us.
The purpose of this project is to expand the reach of our work – which you can witness first-hand in our film entitled, The Work - and our capacity to deliver it outside of prison by training a critical mass of formerly incarcerated people to provide critical social-emotional peer support and deep transformational healing to low-income people, people of color, and opportunity youth. We know these populations because we are these populations. We understand why they don’t utilize the services available to them. We intimately understand the choices that face them each day at home, at school, and on the street. We make community mental health supports culturally relevant as well as deep, meaningful and exponentially more impactful than the array of current offerings today.
Impact
By providing proactive mental health support, human connection, meaning, and purpose in their lives, we will reduce stress, violence and recidivism within our formerly incarcerated trainee population as well as within the populations that our trained facilitators serve in the community.
Funding this project will increase our capacity to deliver our work within a variety of settings inside and outside of prison. For example, we can support more juvenile detention centers like New Jersey's Juvenile Medium Security Facility where we have reduced negative institutional reports by 70% in our healing circle cohort, negotiated a peace treaty between rival gangs, inspired a suicidal teen to live, and begun building a support network to meet their mental health needs in the community. We will also be able to recruit more future facilitators by expanding into Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, CA where we are poised to launch a new program but lack the funding to get started and by continuing to expand our relationship with San Francisco Probation where we will offer larger, more frequent post-incarceration healing circles and intensives.
Perhaps most importantly, with more funding we can dramatically expand our reach within the opportunity youth population through community partnerships with organizations like Youth Empowerment and Goals Association, where we have already diverted 200 children from the criminal justice system over the last 3 years. We will have the capacity to use our lived experience at greater scale to support a new generation of young people in healing their emotional and psychological wounds, developing executive functioning skills, making healthier life choices, and developing the resilience to overcome criminal triggers, chemical dependence and systemic challenges.
Leadership
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Eldra Jackson III
Co-Executive Director
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Lisa Blum
Co-Executive Director