From prison to star employee

Ruthie's Café in South Dallas operates a second-chance employment program that provides jobs and support to individuals with criminal records and those experiencing homelessness. The program hires people often rejected by traditional employers and wraps employment with holistic services, including case management, housing assistance, and transportation support. Currently, 95% of Ruthie's staff are second-chance employees.

ChiFresh Kitchen is a worker-owned cooperative that gives formerly incarcerated people an income, and a second chance, under a corporate structure that attacks high unemployment from the ground up. Formed as a catering business on Chicago's West Side just as the pandemic shutdown began, ChiFresh shifted its intended clientele from nursing homes and schools to food-relief programs distributing free meals. The co-op, initially formed by mostly black women with hopes of scaling up to about 100 worker-owners, echoes the sorts of enterprises formed in response to Jim Crow restrictions of the past.

A workforce development initiative, PowerCorpsPHL, pays participants to learn skills and gain hands-on experience for jobs that offer long-term career opportunity in the field of environmental sustainability. Participants generally have criminal records or have been in the foster care system. In addition to job training and education, PowerCorpsPHL also provides services such as mental health counseling, securing childcare, navigating SNAP and AmeriCorps tuition benefits and helping with paperwork. The program helps 92 percent of participants secure either a job or post-secondary education.

An entrepreneur and activist in Atlanta, GA runs an urban farm and employs former prisoners in an attempt to tackle Georgia's incarceration and recidivism problems. The program, called Gangstas to Growers, employs folks regardless of previous experience and aims to keep up with the rapidly gentrifying community.

Transfr is a tech company that provides free virtual reality job training and education to help facilitate employment opportunities. Transfr specifically focuses on providing these opportunities for disadvantaged people in places like domestic violence shelters, mental health clinics, juvenile detention centers and state correctional institutions where access to skill-building and further education is often hard to access. So far Transfr has 30 partnerships across 18 states.

When Pennsylvania's largest medical-marijuana dispensary, TerraVida Holistic Centers, struggled to find enough employees, given the state's ban on the industry's employment of people with marijuana convictions, TerraVida joined with the Urban League of Philadelphia to expand aid to the formerly incarcerated. Through Urban League's Out4Good program, the partnership helps people expunge their drug convictions. It also counsels and financially helps groups of 10 trainees at a time, dozens of whom have started careers and stayed out of trouble. The group also seeks a longer-term fix: marijuana legalization.

The Volunteers of America's Face Forward 2 program offers a second chance to youth offenders by focusing on education and employment. Destyni Iverson believes the program potentially changed the trajectory of life. She said she felt hopeless when she enrolled, and was on the verge of becoming a high school dropout. Now she is enrolled as a nursing student at Cuyahoga Community College and believes she has a bright future.

The Fringe coffee shop in Hamilton, Ohio, employs people who were formerly incarcerated as part of a re-entry program. The shop owners work with each employee to create a re-entry plan that can include things like therapy, addiction and recovery meetings, tutoring and education, and even free tattoo removal.

Playa Vista Jobs’ Hatch Program is a three-phase program that helps people who were formerly incarcerated and recently released have a smooth reentry and find stable employment in the construction industry. The program begins with getting participants to open their minds to change and emotional healing followed by 500 hours of hands-on construction training in a stable environment, including regular meals. At the end of the program participants receive help securing employment.

The boom in green-energy spending and government grants fuels the work of Leaders Before Legends, a Portland startup that lines up well-paying jobs installing solar panels and the like. The jobs go to people formerly incarcerated on charges related to gun violence. Leaders was founded by a man whose own gun-charge incarceration exposed him to the way that business people think. He turned that exposure into a mission to help others learn how to make money legally and safely. In the past year, the program has found work for 10 people. It is working to expand its city funding to scale up.