It’s a Wednesday morning, and I’m at an event in Lower Manhattan celebrating the inaugural class of Unlocked Futures, a 16-month-long accelerator for social entrepreneurs who have been incarcerated or impacted by the criminal justice system. The room is just big enough to hold the eight entrepreneurs selected for the first group, a videographer with a formidable body-mounted camera rig, and a smattering of employees from nonprofit philanthropic fund New Profit, who come and go as they please ...

Amanda Alexander, one of two entrepreneurs in the group who did not go to prison, wants to transform Detroit into a “Just City” through the Detroit Justice Center, which seeks to make Detroit more equitable by improving transitional housing, reducing fines and ticketing, and more. One of her peers in the cohort is Topeka K. Sam, who just launched the Bronx-based Hope House, which will house women for up to a year after incarceration to help them get back on their feet. During a roundtable the next day, the entrepreneurs had a wide-ranging conversation with John Legend, collector of Grammys and founder of criminal justice reform initiative FreeAmerica. Alexander talked about her own hopes for Sam’s venture. “I can’t wait for Hope House to get off the ground in the Bronx so it can go to Detroit,” she mused.

Connecting entrepreneurs in this space is something Legend and New Profit had in mind when they conceived of Unlocked Futures, which is backed by a $500,000 grant from Bank of America. The accelerator is awarding $50,000 in funding to each entrepreneur, along with coaching and support from New Profit.

Read the full article about Unlocked Futures and how it's helping former inmates-turned-entrepreneurs at fastcompany.com.