Hudson Link: Helping Formerly Incarcerated People Go to School

The Marshall Project May 28, 2018
This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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Hudson Link: Helping Formerly Incarcerated People Go to School Giving Compass

Giving Compass’ Take:

• Arielle Pierre shares the story of how she and her mother both went to prison and then to college with the help of Hudson Link. 

• Can education programs be effectively integrated into prisons? How can philanthropy best support the reintegration of the formerly incarcerated into society? 

• Learn how California’s prisoner education program is yielding impressive results.

I was arrested and booked into a jail in Virginia. I didn’t call my mom for a week. She had gotten out of prison a few years earlier, and now I’d have to tell her I was following in her footsteps.

What the hell did I get myself into? I wondered.

I went to court, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a year in prison. I had already spent eight months behind bars because they denied me bail, and by the time I was transferred to Hazelton prison in West Virginia, I had already served nine months of my sentence.

When I got home, my mother was getting her master’s degree in teaching with the help of Hudson Link, a reentry program that helps formerly incarcerated people get into school and rebuild their lives. My mom told me about St. Francis and their tuition-free college program for former prisoners. But we still lived in Yonkers, and St. Francis is all the way in Brooklyn.

“How am I supposed to get there without a car?” I asked.

“Find a way,” she told me.

As I walked across the stage, I couldn’t believe I was finally graduating. I’d spent the past three years at St. Francis College in Brooklyn finishing my bachelor’s degree in Sociology.

Read the full article about Hudson Link by Arielle Pierre as told to Nicole Lewis at The Marshall Project.

Since you are interested in Higher Education, have you read these selections from Giving Compass related to impact giving and Higher Education?

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    Facebook’s Latest Higher Ed Push Part of Broader Trend

    Giving Compass' Take: · Facebook will partner with 20 community colleges come the end of 2018 in order to provide education opportunities and skills in digital-literacy for small-business leaders. According to EdSurge, these partnerships are part of a larger trend of companies in Silicon Valley to shape curriculum around their products and develop the workforce. · Why are tech companies, like Facebook, investing in workforce development? And how will that influence the way nonprofits approach this space? · Facebook is not only partnering with schools to further higher education, the social platform plays a role in education itself. Learn how students and educators use Facebook in school. Facebook is teaming up with community colleges as part of a nationwide effort to teach digital-literacy skills to small-business leaders and others in cities. This week the company announced that it will add 17 more community colleges as partners by the end of 2018, for a total of 20 partnerships. An example of an already existing community college partnership is with Central New Mexico Community College, where Facebook has been working on a new Digital Marketing Certificate program, and has offered 32 scholarships for students to attend the institution’s “Deep Dive Coding Bootcamps.” Facebook has announced that it has added Bunker Hill Community College and Roxbury Community College as partners, both in Boston. Facebook has not yet decided the nature of those partnerships. Parisa Zagat, policy programs manager at Facebook, says the partnerships will involve working with the community colleges’ current offerings and resources to add content from Facebook. The social network is also working with another company, Entangled Solutions, to establish the partnerships and work with the institutions to create curriculum. Facebook has yet to select the remaining new colleges for the program. Read the full article about Facebook's higher ed push by Tina Nazerian at EdSurge.

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