Good Call NYC’s Post

Transcript

Well, welcome everybody. We're convening our third cohort of folks who are working with Unlocked Futures, our partnership between Free America, which is my organization devoted to ending mass incarceration in America, and New Profit, which is a wonderful organization that's all about helping social entrepreneurs lead. Convene, learn from each other and grow to build organizations that are going to make our communities stronger and better. Jelani Anglin, I am the CEO of a tech hybrid. We're working to dismantle the system of mass incarceration by creating better access to legal support. There's about 10 million people that are getting arrested every year in the United States, and 500,000 of them are going to end up in custody. So how do we continue to, like, reduce the number of people that are coming in contact, but also the people that are ending up in custody? We've been able to. Invest over $120 million annually in the Black Student Achievement Plan with positive resources and supports and care instead of criminalization and pushing them out. One of the biggest things that we have to deal with is negative perceptions, and that did limits our access to employment opportunities, oftentimes resulting in intergenerational incarceration and certainly a lifetime of disenfranchisement. And think of how backwards the logic is. You know you've already punished folks and then you say. After you get done with all that, you can't get a job. It's harder for you to get housing, and it drives recidivism. So a smart society would say, let's empower these folks, but oftentimes America does the opposite. For me, I really think that we need to change the perception of what former incarcerated people look like. I have to let people know that there is plenty of us that speak well and it's plenty of us that don't look like we're formally incarcerated. So I'm really focused on changing the narrative of what we look like. And what people perceive us to be. So let's talk about some of the winds you're experiencing right now, but also what your goals are for the next five years. What does success look like for your organization? I served 26 years. I came home 21 months ago that the vision A-Team, a belief and absolutely no clue how to do it. And so unlike Futures, has been really good for helping me go from a person with an idea. And I want to make the world a better place to having the skills to do it. Wonderful, I developed a organization. New beginnings, Randy services to really bring women out of the penitentiary and help them overcome the trauma. And since I've been here, unlocked futures Move Prophet really has given me that spiritual groundedness. And so we need to create these spaces. Our wins is really saying we're creating spaces to heal. Another win is of course, graduating 160 individuals nationwide. Throughout digital literacy, front end UX UI design courses, I'm seeing our mentees. Go to work at nonprofits, large tech companies and also building technology for our system. Impacted leaders and organizations like the Bail Fund have 5 or 10 years from now, I like to see a massive reparations ecosystem done in an iterative and adaptive approach. Meaning that things are continuously applied, learned from, evolve and adapt it to continuously provide positive outcomes. That's inspiring and it's also we learn from each other, everybody's doing different. Plan to work, but we all have that same North Star that we want to make this country stronger and better. We want to decarcerate and invest in things that actually make people's lives better. And the fact that everyone's finding their way to do it and then learning from each other is a really beautiful thing. Because of your support, we have impacted the lives of so many justice impacted people. When I met you, we were starting to firefighter training program out of a church. See this date three years later. We've helped over 200 people become firefighters and January 1st, 2024 we will be opening up our firefighter training program for formerly incarcerated people. Couldn't do it without you. Obviously I know when we first engaged, I think we had four or five staff and a budget like 200,000 and now we got 26 staff and so it was it was an opportunity for us to all build off the pieces that were given and similarly I have 2424 employees now, so it was amazing from 4 to 26. Unlock futures.