 Aloha, and welcome to Hawaii Reimagined on Think Tech Hawaii. This show was conceived because we're living in a world of uncertainty and facing massive disruptions to our labor markets due to automation and now COVID. On Hawaii Reimagined, I feature innovators and entrepreneurs, both locally and globally, for providing workforce innovation solutions that will make a positive social impact in people's lives and in our communities. Our focus in this show will be to learn what these innovators are doing so we can have inspired conversations about what Hawaii's economy and the future of work might look like as we emerge from the effects of these disruptions. I'm Ruby Menon, your host, and as we're trying to find our way in the world of work, I help people navigate career transitions in my career, get it done, mastermind community. You can learn more at Brainsmartdesign.com. So for today, I'd like to welcome my guest, Chas Williams. He is the Executive Director of WorkNet, an innovative nonprofit that provides preparation and transition services for people who are re-entering their communities from prison. His agency trains inmates in developing cognitive behavior skills and how to do a self-directed job search. WorkNet also provides job placement services to help their clients obtain their ID documents, get a driver's license, create their resume, find employment, secure housing, and other re-entry services that they need to make a successful transition back to their communities. His agency was humming along to help many inmates transition and then COVID happened. So we'll talk about what inspired him to create WorkNet to provide services for the prison population, how he pivoted his nonprofit to continue serving clients during COVID, what community efforts are needed to help ex-offenders find jobs, and full disclosure, Chas is also my husband. So Chas, I'm so happy that you're here to tell us the story about WorkNet and the much-needed assistance that you're providing to formerly incarcerated people so they can re-enter their community. So I'd like to dive right in. And I'd like for you to tell a little bit about your background, what led you to what you're doing now, what inspired you to create WorkNet to provide these much-needed services for the prison population. Well, thank you so much for inviting me and actually getting me on Ruby. I appreciate it very much. And I can tell you it's a thrill to be here just to inform the public and inform people who are watching what we do. My own inspiration, I started as a student here at UH many, many years ago, and I have a BA from UH in a field called Urban Problems, which at the time I was there, I was able to create amalgamating material and learning from psychology, from economics and from sociology. And even at that time, my ambition was to be a social service manager, I would say. And I didn't know quite what, but that's where I vaguely felt I should be doing when I was getting my undergraduate degree. Now, in the meantime, what's happened for me, fortunately, in my career, my first job here was as the director of Hala Kepa, when Hala Kepa was inside the rectory over at the Episcopal Church on Buritania. It's certainly grown into a very large organization now, so I'm very happy to have been part of that. But I worked for the government after that in the city, and I grew actually tired of it very quickly, well, I guess not too quickly because I was there for 10 years. And after that, I started my own company to serve as a person who can write grants and to be a management consultant for nonprofits, which I did for two or three years. And then I stumbled across a grant that I wrote for a customer that didn't want to do it because it involved going into the correctional system, kind of interested me because I've been doing training with the homeless and with populations that were low income and the replacement with them for a long time. So I decided, well, I'll apply for this. If you don't mind, I did and ended up getting it. So that's what started my career in public safety was back in the early, early 1990s with the first contract that we had, which was designed to go into the prison, work with the prisoners before they were released to prepare them better for the job market. And then they helped them get into jobs once they had left the prison. So the opportunity to fall too far from the tree, I guess, is a saying about ancestry. But this is what's happened in my career. We've been doing the same type of job and same type of services over the years. But what we've done has been redefined and transformed over the years to where it's now called reentry and that refers to the process of taking a person who's incarcerated or institutionalized and providing them with a program of development that will assist them beginning before they leave and then cross that transitional barrier to continue assisting them in the community. So in doing that, we've come across a lot of different types of services and needs that our clients that we serve actually have provided to us. And we discovered that many of the services that are inside the facility that insist that inmates are most to get out involve programs that are mandated by the system for them to complete. So let me be clear about that. An inmate can reduce the time that they're serving by being a good inmate. And that's defined in several different ways. An obvious one would be if they're doing programs that improve themselves, then that usually will allow for the parole board or their case managers, the people in the prison to determine that they're doing a serious job of trying to rehabilitate on their own. So some of these programs that are mandated, of course, you would think substance abuse and that would be correct. Substance abuse is a mandated program. Sex offenders are programmed very heavily from the time they come in the facility beyond the time that they leave, that they leave at all in that case. And then we have a specialty that's called cognitive skills training. That's done with an approach called cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT. This is something that I've had the fortunate circumstance of being trained in since the mid 1990s. And I've pursued it and developed it and incorporated that particular kind of methodology into the way that we work with our prisoners right now in the prison population. And it's become what's called best practice. So this is the way that we use developmental programs to meet the needs that our inmates have both to be better as they emerge and better prepared, but also to qualify them by giving them services that will assist them in being able to get out of the prison showing that they have done something that's projected while they were in. Yes, can you tell us a little bit more about for people who don't know what CBT is, is cognitive behavioral therapy? But how does that translate to how you work with the inmates? I mean, what is the objective when you're providing that type of training for them? And how does that help them with their transition? Yeah, that's a very good question, because this is something that's been studied and pretty very consistently over the last 20 years, along with parallel methodologies. But let me make it as simple as I can. When we're talking about CBT, that those initials in the psychology world actually stand for cognitive behavioral therapy. And this is a type of therapeutic approach that's been promoted by people like Aaron Beck and others who are in the field. And it's been appropriated mostly by people who may not be trained in psychology, but are in changed therapies or in treatment facilities or in prison or in human development programs. And that CBT normally means cognitive behavioral training. So it's a slightly different application of the idea. The idea being that people change when they have a motivation to change. And you can develop that motivation within the person by letting the person come to a realization of the things that work best for them. Now, that's a fancy way of saying that what we do is kind of hold up a mirror to the individual. And when that mirror is held up and you can see yourself, then we're asking or we're expecting for two things to happen. By seeing yourself, you're going to see the things that you have been doing in your life. And you'll see both the things that you may have made mistakes in doing. And you'll see the things that may have helped you in the past. Well, what we want to do is we want to make that mirror reveal to the person the things that they can do to access that parts of them that have been successful. Acknowledge the parts that need to have work and that work can be remedial work to fix things. It can be redemptive work to understand that the things I've done have harmed people and I have to address that also. It can be developmental work where rather than looking back and acting out of guilt as an example, we take that information and we turn it around and we look forward and we put together plans that allow us to take advantage of the particular strengths that we have and at the same time address any of those. I won't call them weaknesses. I would call them obstacles or barriers that we have to actually conquer. So when we identify those things and we know what they are, whoa. Well, there goes the neighborhood. OK. The doors of Zoom and being at home. Anything can happen around here. Look at 2020. That's what I expected. 2020, anything can happen. That's right. Yeah, so I wanted to also focus and make sure that we have enough time to talk about some of the local incarceration issues that we have. You know, we have a fairly large native Hawaiian population that is incarcerated here. I believe the statistics are like around 30%. Oh, it's higher than that. Oh, it's higher than that? Yeah, it's higher than that. That may be when we're looking at people who are not totally identifying as a line with mixed Polynesian or something. In our experience, just over 40, it's around there. So it's pretty high. Whatever way you want to slice it, it's shocking and really unacceptable. So something that we have to do something about. We're going to need to take a short break. I'm Ruby Menon, and this is Hawaii Reimagine on the Think Tech Live streaming network series. And we're talking with Chas Williams from Worknet about the services that his nonprofit provides for people transitioning from prison to the community to help them with the successful reentry process. We'll be back in a minute, so stay tuned for more of our story with Chas Williams. I'm Ruby Menon, and this is Hawaii Reimagined on the Think Tech Live streaming network series. I'm talking with Chas Williams, the executive director of Worknet, and he runs an innovative nonprofit that provides preparation and transition services for people who are reentering their communities from prison. So we had left off about some of the programs that you were providing to the inmates. And I believe that you were doing the training inside the prisons during this time. You were providing the services inside the prisons as you were saying. But now we know with COVID, a lot of people have had to pivot. And so tell us a little bit about your pivot story, like what happened and how did you, how are you continuing to provide the services for the clients during this time? It's strange how things happen. And when COVID hit, around the first week of March, it really began to be a problem inside the correctional facilities, knowing that this may be a threat. The 20th of March, we were banned. All programs pretty much were closed. And at that time, we were operating under a grant from the city and county. And we had to produce. We were paid only if we were training people and then producing people who were actually entering the community. And without being able to go in, we couldn't do that. So we were panicked. What happened was really, it was so funny and inspirational because I had applied for a PPP loan, one of the government loans that was so controversial. Small businesses couldn't get. We're about the smallest you could possibly be. But we were able to get one of those loans. But the loan required that we bring people off of unemployment. And all of our staff was totally laid off because we had no work. So I had to bring people back to actually qualify or else that grant, the PPP money, would turn from a loan to a grant. I'm sorry, from a grant to a loan. So we called people back from unemployment and we had no work inside the facility. So we decided, listen, we've got to find some way to get in contact with these inmates. So we wrote them and asked them if they would be interested in finishing the course. We had about 27 inmates, men and women, that were being trained when COVID hit. So we were right in the middle of a training course when this happened to us. Well, the inmates that we wrote to responded and said, yes, yeah, go ahead, send this stuff to us and then we'll work on it and we'll see what would work out. Well, that inspired us and what we did. We have a 48 hour, 24 course training program for the cognitive behavioral training called Lifestyles. And our Lifestyles program at that time was allowing inmates to progress through the prison system and get trained and then move through the parole, which requires that they have this kind of training before being released. In doing that, we reconstructed our entire curriculum into correspondence workbooks. And we made our entire 48 hour curriculum into six workbooks that we send out to the inmates directly that have answer sheets and other correspondence embedded in them. And then they send those back to us and they get credit for achieving that particular lesson. As long as they do it correctly and do it right, if they don't, then we will send the lesson back to them so that they can reconstruct it and then get the next lesson to proceed. So we've been working with the parole board and also with the case management teams at the women's facility and at the halal facility to do this. And we're now, I can very proudly say we're in looking at COVID realizing that this is nothing that is anywhere near any of our control. And we really have, we must begin to realize that this situation that we're in may be semi-permanent. And what I mean by that, it's already lasted months, six months, and look at where we are. We're still in the shutdown after six months. Other economists are not allowing us to be in the back. So we have now decided this may be something that we are doing as a matter of routine. So I think, so what it sounds like to me is that you kind of went back to old school corresponding style type of workbooks. And I was wondering if we could put up some photos because one of the things that I think is so unique about these workbooks is also that you have a resident artist who was formerly incarcerated, was one of your clients. And now is doing a lot of the artwork for these workbooks. You want to tell us a little bit more about that? I do. And let me give a shout out to Mo Calakai who is our staff artist and to Sharon Thompson who is our all around women specialist and our editor and researcher on the workbooks. All three of us have worked very hard on this. And I must give them the credit for it because they're the ones doing home and work. I'm just doing the writing and the editing and the publishing and that sort of stuff. But in coming together, actually I can say this was the perfect trio, then the perfect blend of our talents to be able to create something that is meaningful and our best attestation is coming from the people we have in our classes right now who are saying that they're enjoying of all things, the material because at this point, we're the only people that can train because the lockout is still in effect for people who are training inside the correct facilities. So the innovation I think here is the fact that as you were mentioning, we've gone backward in order to go forward. We have taken something that's from 100 years ago in correspondence and we've amalgamated that with distance learning through Zoom. So at Halawa, we're sending out this material by mail. The inmates are receiving it and working on it and sending the material back to us. But we meet with them twice weekly on Zoom and we go over not just the lessons because they're reading the lessons already, we're going over some of the concepts that are behind the lessons and we're querying them about how they're using the material and how it's affecting their daily life and if it's being incorporated into what they do. So this is a great vehicle for us to continue to work with them and to actually make this the kind of effort that has to be done within the amalgamation of people who are not just our field and the private sector and the community, but we had a lot of cooperation within public safety and parole to do this and to pull it off. So I have to commend the case management staff at Halawa and also at the women's facility for the work that they do and how they have really helped and supported us. The learning centers also because our Zoom class is happening inside the learning center at Halawa. It's a really wonderful experience to be able to do this and then to see the change that continues to happen because we are touching these people in an effective way. Yeah, I just find that so fascinating that, you know, everyone is having to go through this technology and it's leaving no one... There's no stone that's not turned, right? I mean, everyone from school children now to inmates are having to do this virtual learning experience and it's pretty fascinating that you've been able to do this. I was wondering if we could put some more photos up because some of the artwork is really quite striking on the... Yeah, that's the cover of our assessment that we do vocational and risk and resilience for inmates who are entering the job market. So that's one of the most creations there that he's made for us. That's an illustration that we have in one of our lessons where we're giving the idea that when people are down and out they're in a survival mode, they may be living on the street or close to it, they would be tempted to actually choose things like drugs over food and we get our inmate population to examine that idea because some have been in that situation where they've had to choose. Some of those have been in the situation where they've been the drug dealer and they still had to take responsibility for the things they're doing in society. So that's part of the structure that we have. We have lively discussions about the material itself so it isn't just reading the material and responding by doing the answer sheet. It's how your life is being affected by the issues and the concepts that we're discussing and how you can take control of your life and then understand that you're not a victim as long as you take responsibility for what it is you're doing. Now you came up with a very interesting acronym for this program. You want to tell us a little bit more about that and what is it and what does it stand for? Yeah. And then we can also show some of the graphics that illustrate that. Yes, the program is called PCHAM but it's definitely an acronym and it actually came from the impetus for this program itself. That stands for pre-COVID help and mentoring program. Pre-COVID, I'm sorry, post-COVID. I'm going to be the opposite of whatever. It started pre-COVID because that's what it initiated. Post-COVID means that we're operating in a method that will allow us to continue to operate in spite of COVID being there. The help that we're providing is in the form of the training and the development that we do. The mentoring happens in two different directions. The mentoring that we're talking about, we're encouraging that this is really something that is new. So when we send our material out, we're encouraging the people in the institution that gets it to hook up with the other people who are in the class with you. Now we don't call it a class. We don't refer to it that way. We refer to it as a team and we refer to the person that is actually working with that team as a coach. And the material that's being sent back from the prison from each of the maybe 12 to 15 people in that class is going to one person and that person is their coach who scores, communicates, advises, and mentors that person. And they stick with them all the way from the time that we meet them in prison at the time that that person is in the community and we're working with them. Now the other way that mentoring works in addition to our professional people that are helping them meet in the community, they mentor themselves inside the institution by getting together and discussing among themselves the lessons that we're sending in, the concepts behind the lessons so that as a team they can work together so that people who we may usually have to coach a little bit more because there may be some underlying issues that they have that they're working with and by that I mean it may be a language barrier or it could be an educational barrier, it could be a cultural barrier, it could be things that they're dealing with where the reading of the material itself could be a challenge for them. Yeah, I'm sorry but we're coming to the end and I really wanted to talk about helping inmates transition and find jobs but it looks like we're going to have to end here. But thank you so much Chaz for telling us about the PCHAM program and I just want to remind everyone that I'm Ruby Menin, this is Hawaii Reimagined on the ThinkTech live streaming show and you can get a hold of WorkNet if you'd like to learn more at www.worknetinc.org and you can check out their website and we've been talking with Chaz Williams, the Executive Director of WorkNet and I'd like to thank everyone for being here and hopefully you'll tune back in next Wednesday or actually Wednesday, October 21st in two weeks at 3 p.m. We'll be talking to Alec Wagner, the Director of the Purple Prize Innovation Incubator and Accelerator and that should be a very interesting discussion about some of the awesome things that they're doing in the community. So until then please be safe, be healthy and be kind to one another. Aloha. www.worknetinc.org