Next Steps Re-entry

Well, in 2003, we saw a number of individuals who were struggling to find employment, who had, really didn’t have any options. And more and more individuals that were coming into our career centers had records or had some involvement and were really not able to find employment. So we began to work specifically with that group.

The coordinator of this program was an individual who already worked for us, but before that, he had come from the community. He was well-known. He was the guy that would go to midnight basketball to work with kids, you know, to do whatever it took to get somebody in. So his experience, his contacts really helped us launch this in a way that was probably easier than it would have been if we just had to start from scratch.

The Next Step program is a second chance program to help ex-offenders, uh, uh, get jobs, training, education advancement, and eventually to turn their life around. He now goes into prisons and makes contact there. He works with judges. He works with corrections. He works with, uh, police departments. Glenn Young is my job navigator, and he is someone that’s very special to me.

I recruited him when I visited, uh, one of the prisons. He was there giving a, a motivational speech to young kids. I walked in their shoes. I’ve been where they’ve been. Um, I’ve, I made some mistakes in my life where, uh, prison was a part of my life, but I re- rehabilitated my life. Um, I got some training, got some development, got a full pardon.

I don’t have a record now. But my passion to that world and where I came from is still thriving. It’s still alive, and it’s my heart beats for them. So, you know, I can, I can feel what they feel. Everybody had a little hand in helping to mold this thing in the beginning. And over the years, we found that more and more employers and more and more individuals were coming, coming to us, and we were having a greater and greater success.

People who are coming out of prison, for the most part, have nothing, really have absolutely nothing. They have no documentation. They have no, no license. At least if they had one, it’s expired. Too often, people are just released in the past, nowhere to go, nowhere to turn. They need to get a place to stay.

They need to get transportation. If you go back 20 years, it’s, uh, most of these individuals that were being released from incarceration were just being released on the streets. So we see release, 20 years ago, on the green, um, with a clear plastic bag and sweatpants and sweatshirt that just came out of, um, jail with.

When I got out, I had absolutely nothing. I had clothes that don’t fit me. I had a penitentiary ID that is acceptable to law enforcement, but I can’t gain a, a hotel room with it. I had a little thin windbreaker. I had shoes that were just way too small. Just imagine you coming out m- after a long time. You don’t know where you are.

You don’t know what services are out there for you. Um, and, you know, the government then expects to, that people will make it on their own, and it’s, it’s not like that. I mean, you get your survival instincts. You need a place to sleep. You need to eat. They’re left, dropped outside, and they don’t know no place to stay, no place to live, no food, no nothing.

So, you know, it’s like, you know, you’re gonna have to sleep out in the cold. What are they gonna do to eat? I don’t have no money. I don’t have no nothing. Wh- what are you gonna do to survive? I mean, you’re gonna end up doing what you know. I know crime. I know drugs. I know violence. You know what I mean? Uh, I didn’t wanna get back into it, but I mean, you know, if you’re hungry, you’re gonna eat.

You know, I, I can easily, you know, go hit someone in the head with something and take their money, you know, uh, ge- to get what I need. You, you resort to crime. Um, and oftentimes, that leads people back to incarceration. I feel like they set me up for failure because they put me out here with no resources whatsoever.

So, you know, that’s, that’s dangerous

We did a kind of a really down and dirty survey on recidivism. In Connecticut, two years, 44% are rearrested. Three years, it’s 50%. At five years, it’s even more than that. And a lot of that is due to lack of resources, lack of resources when they’re being arrested, lack of resources and support when they’re entering into the criminal justice system on many different levels, but particularly once they’re becoming incarcerated.

And then as individuals are looking to be released from jail, how are we supporting them as a community, as a society? The important thing for us as a government is to ensure that people have the right resources when they come out of incarceration so that they can reintegrate in society and have tangible opportunities, um, to be successful and turn around their lives.

We learned through our past experiences that people returning from home from incarceration, they need to access resources right away, on the day that they are released. Otherwise, the chances that they will turn around their lives and find those, um, resources on their own is very little.

So through data, um, we saw that around 80% of people have substance abuse, uh, history. Around 60% have a mental health illness history, and around 35% have a medical condition that’s chronic and, you know, they need access to nu- nursing care. We also saw that about 64% of people do not have a GED or high school diploma.

So it’s huge. I mean, I mean, the needs that people have is huge. We need to ensure that they have access to mental health treatment, that they have access to substance abuse treatment, that they have access to employment opportunities, um, to workforce development, that they can, um, get their GED or high school diploma.

Um, those things are, are much needed. It’s housing, it’s jobs, it’s transportation. It’s things that you and I take for granted

We have, uh, a great partnership with the police, with corrections, with the city, with other nonprofit providers The purpose of the Reentry Welcome Center is to give individuals who have either returned from incarceration recently or returned at some point in their life and are hitting barriers, to give them opportunities.

It starts pre-release. It starts when an individual is incarcerated. If they are speaking to their reentry counselor and it surfaces that they’re going to have some issues upon release, they will ask for a referral, and then upon release they are sent here. Um, the Department of Corrections drops them off at our doorstep for them to receive a warm handoff to service providers We have what we call a handoff.

Not a drop off, but a handoff, meaning that those individuals that are coming out, that are being returned, they’re handed off to a case manager that’s ready to work with them directly and apply them to different resources that are available within the city of New Haven. It’s also a place where you can find, um, services, um, that are often scattered across town and hard and difficult to access.

So it’s a one-stop shop. So that everyone who’s coming home gets to go to one place and has resources right there. Having groups that are all out there with the same mission and are available to an individual at the same time or within a short amount of time is, is very important to success. And all the case managers come together to talk about the hard cases.

The Reentry Care Team is a team that meets on a biweekly basis. Of, it’s a team of service providers, including the Workforce Alliance, to triage issues, to, uh, discuss new opportunities, and to work on ways to help our clients more and avoid service gaps. How to ensure that people get coordinated services and ensure that they have what they need, uh, to be successful.

Now we have a place to go. People, there’s a triage there. We’re part of that group that is working with the individuals. It’s all about collaboration, and one of the things that we practice here at Project MORE is come together with different organizations throughout the city as far as collaborating. We don’t wanna work in, in silos.

We wanna work together, and c- and collaborate together in order to get the, the, uh, get things done properly. Collaboration is absolutely key. There needs to be a group of resources that is centered around re-entry because everybody needs something different. No one department can do it all. We have at least 10 to 15 different, uh, neighborhood organizations that we work with directly.

Every program can work together and be a spider web of each other. You come to my program, and I’m not the right fit, and I know that I have this program right here, and we’re working together. It’s amazing when w- when they come together, all these programs, and are able to coordinate, um, the services. It makes a huge difference.

So the Reentry Welcome Center partners with Next Steps, um, which is a workforce development program from the Workforce Alliance, which is an amazing program. They work with people to help them get soft skills and help, help them get hard skills at the same time, um, to ensure that they have access to jobs with livable wages, um, that can really turn their lives around and help them re-enter society, help them support their families.

We have a pre-release initiative that we started in 2015, getting to individuals about two or three months before they’re released, starting to work on getting the documentation that they need, starting to have a plan. Next Steps program is providing individuals with training, um, prior to release to help them with their job search when they are, uh, released from incarceration.

It’s critically important for somebody to have a plan and a place to go before they r- are released. The pre-release is setting an individual up to know what to expect, to set out some guidelines of this is what is going to happen, to give some mental health treatment or evaluations prior so that upon coming out, knowing what your triggers are, being able to have you as successful as possible, but also what job skills can you have before coming out so that you’re better set up to be matched with an employer upon release.

So when they come out, they h- they have a plan, they have a place to go, they have individuals that have already met with them pre-release. And I think it helps an individual feel supported on both ends. Knowing that you’re coming up to be released, you’re not feeling like, “I’m just gonna be thrown back out there,” because what if someone has been in for 10 years?

Things have changed wildly in 10 years. What we’re seeing, uh, is that we’re having greater success in getting that person who’s, who we’ve worked with pre-release as opposed to someone who comes in off the street, getting that person employed and having better retention. And as one of our case managers in the Next Step program says, we want people to believe in themselves when they leave, right?

We want them to have the confidence to interview well, get a job, and keep a job. It is imperative that people return to the workforce. Giving someone the opportunity to have a job does several things. First of all, it gives them a sense of connection back into the community. Um, secondly, it gives them the tools necessary to sustain their home.

Um, housing, like I said, is a big issue, and if you can’t pay for housing, it’s very hard to manage other issues, such as substance abuse and/or mental health. Um, for individuals to reunite with their families is imperative, and a job helps them do all of that because now they are providing resources for their families.

Soft skills are much needed. People, they are institutionalized, so when they come out, they, they need to understand how the world works. It’s, it’s a different world. They showed me how to live different. They showed me how to walk different. They, they embraced me with learning skills, and, and now I’m getting more comfortable with doing these things.

A person coming out of incarceration, living in prison is a whole different world. Then they come out to the world, and they have to deal with this world that’s not what they was used to. Life skills is very important, showing them how to navigate, how to catch a bus, showing them how to work a cellphone, showing them how to work a email, showing them how to just talk, have regular English, uh, how life is on a conventional level.

I didn’t understand what th- these guys was trying to tell me about life skills. Life skills, guys, is all about changing, um, for the better. Changing for the better meaning- Let’s, let’s… I start with the basics. We talking reading, writing. We talking being able to communicate. We talking being able to, uh, go out in the field and, and, and, and deal with the people.

You have to learn how to humble yourself. Um, you, you have to be willing to accept good criticism. You, you, you have to be willing to listen and, and be able to take advice and just take notes and learn things that you really don’t know nothing about. Like, being in the office setting was very hard for me because I wasn’t familiar with it, and they showed me these things, these tools that they embraced.

We’re talking about teaching people how to use computers. We talking about skills that’s a, a necessity today. Um, normal things in life, you know. Um, they, they basically give you the basics and then they help you get to the next level. There’s two dates that we can’t change. We can’t change the day we was born and we can’t change the day we die, but we can change what happened in between, and I wanna change what happened in between there like.

I said, “You know what? Well, I’m gonna do everything I can to change my past to, to a brighter future,” because I lived that life where I, I was hopeless. Once these guys got in my life, it wasn’t nothing nobody could tell me that I couldn’t do. I work at the Whitney Center today. I’m a utility supervisor.

I’ve been in there for two years. Excellent job, excellent community. I get a lot of thank yous and appreciations and, and you know what? I’m okay today.

We have people also that have gone through the Next Step programs and have gotten, um, their CDL license, have gotten construction jobs, have gotten into, um, different industries that help them get paid what they need to survive. We have found a federal program that provides bonding for ex-offenders, so a lot of the, there are a lot of driving jobs, truck driving jobs out there, but if you can’t get bonded, you can’t get the job.

And, and so we’re able to do that. The position that I applied for was litter driver, basically cleaning the parking lots overnight, okay? The way that this, it was described to me was you are working eight to late, so basically you’re not done until you’re done. The job involved, um, we’re driving a sweeper truck.

Uh, it’s a regular box truck with a vacuum underneath and a, and a broom on the left side. Um, uh, we were also given a hand picker and a hand blower. That’s to go to the places that the truck can’t go onto. Uh, you hand pick the grass lines and the wood lines. You blow off the walkways, and then you sweep it up with the truck.

Um, so basically, uh, it, it’s an outside job. You’re literally more out of the truck than you’re in the truck. You know, you’re doing a lot of jumping in and out. It’s a lot of walking. I grew in the job because every time someone looked at me or they’ll say, “Oh, you’re training Tasha today,” I always got that look, like what’s she doing here type look.

I was the only female. These guys, if they give 100, I gotta give 150, you know? So I believe that was my motivator, was like, you know what I mean, come on, I, I can do this better than you. That was my thing. And the great thing about it, they grew… I literally was getting a raise every year. It was acknowledgement.

Having a job makes you independent and feel good about yourself. So I rose up in the ranks, and now I’m the manager. I started with litter driver position, and went to lead driver and assistant manager, and maybe I’ve been the manager now for three years.

You have to start someplace, and many of them, uh, want to start, but they don’t know how. So we show them how to do it. I was getting turned down for jobs and, you know, um, I just felt very scared. I, I was nervous. Um, I had a baby I had to take care of. I had a family at home. I, I, I didn’t know what to do, honestly.

Then I, I really thought my life was over. I didn’t know where I would go from there. I d- I, you know, I didn’t think I was gonna be able to finish school. I didn’t think I was gonna be able to keep working. I didn’t know what I was gonna do with my baby, you know? And I ended up finding the Next Step program, and I got in contact with Glenn Young, and ever since then, I mean, we’ve been working through the pandemic and everything.

I’ve got a, I got a job a week after we started working together. He would talk me through it. There was times when I’m like, “I can’t do this. I won’t get the job. I won’t…” And he, you know, “Kelsey, don’t give up. Don’t give up.” He helped me set up a resume. He’s helped me get reference letters. I needed somebody to, you know, guide me to put the packet together.

I didn’t know to do that. You know, I just had to put everything together. I have to finish school. You know, I have to take care of my baby. You know, it’s all up to me now. She needs me.

I’ve been through the struggle. I know what it is to have, I know what it is to have not. And, and my thing is, to stay afloat, I have to walk different and stay grounded. And it’s a hard process. It’s not easy. Change your attitude from negative to positive, hold up your head, and speak to people, and answer question, tell the truth.

And if you do that, I can pretty much guarantee that you gonna be on the road to recovery and become a success story. I know that I worked my butt off. I gave more than 100% every time I punched in. Every time I came in, I made sure that I did my best. It just felt awesome to earn it and know you earned it, and you did all the right things to get it, you know?

It was great ’cause it was, I think, the first real accomplishment, honest accomplishment, you know? Every person that walk away from, uh, uh, the program, we want you to come back and speak to the next group behind you. I go in and I speak. You should see their faces when I tell ’em I started off as a litter driver and now I’m, I got a crew of 16 guys working underneath me.

Man, they can’t believe it, and this is where I started, in this room right here, you know? So it’s awesome. It’s awesome getting the, uh, feedback, and it’s also giving back. You know, let ’em know, know that this actually works. Today was the first day I gave back to the class. I’ve, I’ve never been in that conference room before, so it was nice to see everybody in person again.

Uh, this is my first time ever talking, but I just wanna say thank you to Glenn Youngkin and Freeman Holiday. I don’t know where I would be without them. I felt very accomplished, very proud of myself, you know, because of everything I’ve been through, and I made it, you know? I, I didn’t… When I thought I wouldn’t make it, I did.

I graduated with my associate’s degree in May 2021. I got my CNA license May of 2021. Um, I’m going to University of Bridgeport for my bachelor’s degree, looking to, um, go to school for, to be a nurse. Life is great. Right now I’m currently working at Yale New Haven Hospital. So I’m very proud I was able to move out, move on, and get a new job, and be successful, um, for my daughter.

And of course, it’s not the end. I have plenty. You know, I’m only 22 years old. I have a whole future ahead of me.

When we started this program, we had maybe four or five employers and about 20 participants. You know, now we’ve placed well over 2,000 people in employment. More and more employers are willing to take a chance on hiring an ex-offender. Now, when we went to Next Steps, the people, the candidates that they sent, immediately you can see these people ha- were authentic about their commitment to having, using their second chance that they’ve received.

These people were trained better, and they were prepared to enter the workforce. They interviewed well. They, uh, were able to look you right in the eye, and you can tell that that commitment to wanting to be employed was there. You could see they genuinely wanted to be part of our company. The people that we’ve brought on so far are excelling.

They’re doing everything that we had hoped to get out of them. They have a real authentic commitment to bettering themselves. Gavin came in, uh, through our recruiter, Katie, and, um, I interviewed him for probably 25, 30 minutes. Thought he was a fantastic individual. Great guy. Uh, here’s somebody who came in, that day one came in, interviewed very well, was very committed to bettering himself, taking advantage of this second chance he’s been given into the workforce.

He went through training, was an all-star in the class. And it’s really been enjoyable working with him. He’s pleasant. He’s, uh, you could tell he’s somebody that’s learned from his life experiences, and he’s been a, gotten a do-over, and really appreciates every opportunity that’s been given to him. We put him out in the field, and from day one have gotten great reviews from the supervisors and, and crews he’s been working with.

Big change from 20 years ago, we would have shied away from hiring somebody with a criminal record. Now we’ve learned that there’s a, a, a real well of people that you can go to that is a real committed workforce, and great opportunities as a business to grow and build on a community. We need a labor pool, and it’s a good resource to, to get quality people in the door.

The Next Steps program has been a bridge between this pool of people and ourselves, that once they cross that bridge, they’ve been trained and polished so, so you would say, to come in and really have somebody that we can use and build upon. Today, if I had five, six more people to put in the field, I could keep them all busy.

Um, and, and our business just keeps growing, and that number is gonna keep increasing. With Next Steps, it’s a win-win program for us because the employee gets to win by getting this new opportunity and expand themselves, and we win as a company because we get these great employees that we can build our company on.

So the more people you send in the door, the more people we’ll have in the field.

The outcome of this is not only are we helping the individual, we’re helping their family, we’re helping Connecticut employers meet their staffing needs, and, uh, people are becoming productive mayor, taxpayers, and, uh, you know, and there’s less, less crime. We work very closely with the court system. We work very closely with the police department.

You know, we get referrals from them. So we- we’re a resource to the system, not only to the individual. We as society are releasing people without any means to provide for themselves or their families. All we’re asking for them to do is to go back to the ways that they knew they used to be able to do it in the past.

So it’s vital. Without a job, how can you provide? Without a job, you can’t get to that next step. Without a job, you end up doing the things that potentially got you into jail and got you arrested. When we as a police department continuously re-arrest the same people, all it does is show us that something in the system is broken.

We want individuals to be successful. We don’t wanna keep, uh, re-arresting individuals, so we need to fix it. This is a way that we are moving to be able to fix this. We’ve looked at, uh, the recidivism numbers, very, very preliminary data, but we’re seeing much better results, fewer and fewer people going back to prison or being re-arrested in the time period that, that happens for most other individuals.

The police wanna engage positively with the community. It’s our job to, obviously, to prevent crime. That’s our ma- one of our main focuses. But individuals who are being successful are not out there committing crimes. It’s safer for the police officers, it’s safer for the community, and it’s promoting public safety.

The city really envisions, uh, being a place where our returning residents can, can have the opportunity to turn their lives around, reunify with their families, and be successful and not go back to incarceration. To keep the program alive, it takes money and it takes people, and so far over the years, we’ve managed to do that through federal grants, and when we haven’t been able to do that, we found other ways to fund the program, because we feel very strongly that this is a worthwhile program.

We’ve done a lot of good for a lot of people, and we wanna keep it going.

I mean, I would have never made it where I am if it wasn’t for the program, honestly