 All right, good morning everyone I Said good morning everyone Who is ready to give away a million dollars? This is exciting Tuesday morning heart of SoCAP really excited to see all of you here for the Justice Innovation Prize competition We are living through an age of Invention and disruption and yet for the last 200 years There is a part of our society that has remained completely unchanged our prison system. So that's about to change right now I'm Yanos Martin and the chief advocacy officer at dream.org We are an organization committed to closing prison doors and opening doors of opportunity That means that we work with people directly impacted by the prison system to change laws and policies at the state local and federal level However, we've come to the conclusion that legislation alone is not going to end mass incarceration We need to work with allies across different industries people who are doing cutting-edge work in Technology to figure out that if there are ways to disrupt the prison industry using technology and innovation So that's why this year in January. We launched the justice innovation prize I'm commending to give away one million dollars to the best ideas to disrupt the prison industry The five finalists that you're going to hear from today are the people who have made it through that difficult process We had hundreds of people register 75 finalists who went through peer review who went through expert panel review Who were looked at by dream.org very carefully and these five finalists Have really delivered in the four ways that we're evaluating the best ideas for the future. These ideas are innovative They're new to the field. They're impactful. They're going to help a lot of people if they succeed. They're feasible We really believe that the each of these finalists are capable of pulling off the idea that they're sharing with you today and And they're scalable It's very important for us when we think about solutions for the criminal justice system to not only have a good idea But have a good idea that can work anywhere in the country if it's implemented So that's how we got here today five finalists out of many applicants We were proud in this process that we had many applicants from historically marginalized communities 71% of the applicants were led by people of color 60% were led by women and 74% were led by people directly impacted by the criminal legal system and you're really going to see that reflected in the five finalists that we have here today So the way this is going to work is each of them are going to come out and pitch for a few minutes But dream.org, you know, we're new to this space. We're new to this kind of entrepreneurialism So we decided to have five esteemed judges join us today to help us pick the winner They're going to choose three winners. We're going to get two hundred fifty thousand dollars each That's on top of the fifty thousand dollar planning grants that each of these finalists received So I'm going to introduce them one by one and you give her a round of applause for all of actually give them applause as they come out Why not first an entrepreneur and author Hannah Broughman? Second an investor in residence at Dynamo Ventures and the founder of Rockyard Ventures Daniel Dart Third an impact investor and founding partner of the Candid group and something of a so-cap legend Morgan Simon Next a president and creative director at Shaka Senghor Inc. Shaka Senghor and Mary Rivera is running late. So I will step in her stead if she is not able to make it So with that These five judges are going to listen to each of the presentations and we're going to ask questions of all of the five finalists And so very excited to welcome the very first finalists from unlocked labs Jessica Hinckwin Powering justice-involved Technologists to leverage their lived experience unlock labs is a nonprofit building a better justice system from the inside out My name is Jessica Hickman. I'm CTO and co-founder of unlocked labs At 16 I was sent to prison on a life without parole sentence Walked away in the Potosi Correctional Center, Missouri's death row prison. I had no access to formal education Even after a landmark Supreme Court case gave me the opportunity to come home I left prison after 26 years without a single formal education experience Unfortunately, this part of my story is the norm for the United States three out of five incarcerated adults are functionally literate Seven out of ten do not have a high school diploma and less than six percent have access to higher education As an unsurprising result 83% of those released from prison will be re-arrested within ten years But this does not have to be a reality Research shows that by increasing access to education we can nearly eliminate the likelihood of re-arrest While incarcerated I was so frustrated by my lack of access to education that I took matters into my own hands I taught myself how to code without the internet with that stack of textbooks with my peers don't unlock ed unlock ed is an open-source comprehensive digital education Platform designed specifically for corrections environments to focus on creating data-driven solutions to mass incarceration To illustrate let's consider for example Damien's story Through unlock ed Damien accesses college courses from Washington University vocational training from Plurals site anger management from his mental health providers and basic computer literacy training from Google Well Damien gains education Unlock ed quietly gathers data in the background allowing him to validate his educational experiences to pulling authorities and future employers His Damien returns to his community existing parole tracking programs will will assess his reentry success correlating with unlock ed data justice professionals will be able to Refind education offerings to achieve maximum effectiveness What really makes unlock ed so unique though is that Damien's experience is shaped by justice-involved technologists that are just like him Technologists that have a combined to two centuries of experience living closest to the problem We partner those tech those technologists with industry experts for example one of our team members has 15 years of experience leading engineering at Blackboard Another has successfully scaled multiple tech startups Collectively we had the experience necessary to make corrections evidence-based and data-driven Through our unique approach we can lead corrections back to its rehabilitative intent Reducing the prison population by more than 50% over the next 10 years in the short term. We can have immediate impact today though Unlock ed was deployed nationally. We could enable this nation's earn credit release laws laws that go largely underutilized Through this process students would be able to validate their program participation These laws can be used to their fullest intent and 350,000 individuals could be immediately released as a result You know I left prison 21 years ago and now I'm a justice innovation price finalist My story isn't an anomaly, but it doesn't have to be Unlock labs has a potential launch in five states next year by taking this next step We'll be able to prove a national model that that can be replicated to all 50 states We're going to take this step though. We need your help Unlock labs is raising two million dollars to reach five states By taking this next step, we'll be able to prove to governments the safety and cost benefits of our solution Governments that it will be willing to invest in the solution unlock labs offers. I Hope that you will join our community of supporters and together we can build a better justice system from the inside out. Thank you About about this. Hi, that was amazing pitch So you need two million for five states and then does that cost come come down per state after that and Your nonprofit correct Okay So yeah, can you just tell me how like how much capital do you need in order to scale across the United States? Sure a couple things one. We're taking this plan to feed its catalyst approach So the idea is by reaching five states We can prove out to governments that this is an effective solution our end goal is to build public infrastructure We should do all the governments so currently through the philanthropy We've received I have a team of eight people and we've reached roughly five thousand people We believe that by getting that two million we can increase our team large enough to reach five hundred thousand people So it is it is not a linear scale. It is a matter of reaching that proof of concept Just really quick. Do you have to in order to get into each state pilot Do you have to talk to the state got like governing system of that state? Individually for each state that you want to get into that's a great question And I believe that is one of our advantages on my labs is that we have experienced working with the individual states In fact, we've interfaced with 25 of the 50 states currently to gauge, you know, product market fit And there's always an interest in data-driven solutions All right next up we have Dev Sheen a rotra from justice text in 2015 I left my hometown to attend school in Chicago as I settled in I grew to fall in love with the city It's history and its people But as I soon came to realize Chicago is a rather complicated place It's a city in which a 17 year old Unarmed black American boy by the name of Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a local police officer That officer only received seven years as punishment But without the dash cam footage of the incident there likely would have been no accountability at all More and more police interactions are being caught on camera than ever before Well over 50% of law enforcement agencies have already rolled out body cams And the typical police department captures tens of thousands of hours of footage per year As a society we've invested over a hundred million dollars in rolling out this police technology But we failed to ask the question. How does this actually lead to greater accountability? What most people don't realize is that the system to analyze this data is broken A Virginia public defender recently said that there was no way physically possible For him to review the sheer volume of footage he receives For reviewing this data is critical Because it reveals information that could redirect people's lives Before they experience the harms of incarceration Hi, my name is Dave Shee and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Justice Text During my senior year in college, I reached out to my local public defenders and I told them I wanted to try and make a difference Public defenders serve 80% of all criminal defendants in this country, but they are systemically underfunded, understaffed, and underestimated. We knew we could change that. We started building the first centralized infrastructure for cataloging, storing, analyzing, and sharing audio video data in the criminal justice system. Our software transcribes this footage in a matter of minutes and we leveraged state-of-the-art and machine learning to automatically generate a timeline of key events. As an attorney, I can now jump to the exact moment my client was morandized and ministered a field to variety test or placed under arrest. Attorneys also use our software to decode a wide range of proprietary file formats created by monopolistic jail call providers and body cam manufacturers. We started off as a small school project and today we're serving over 50 public defender offices nationwide, including statewide partnerships with Massachusetts and Kentucky. Houston's Chief Public Defender told us that we've already delivered 50% in time-safe conditions, and that we're going to be able to do a lot of different things. For his attorneys. To date, we've processed over 15,000 hours of footage on our platform, which has been used to dismiss charges and reduce sentences for countless defendants. Here's one example. In Kentucky, a public defender recently secured an acquittal for a client that was facing 10 to 20 years in prison. During the trial, he realized that the opposing witnesses testimony contradicted what they had said in prior recorded statements. He then immediately used justice text to find those contradictions across hours of footage and impeach the witness with their own words. He told us that because of our technology, this was the first time he felt as if he was on a level playing field with the prosecution. Not only are we making a tangible impact, but our path to doing so is sustainable. We charge an annual subscription and are close to crossing a million dollars in sales this year alone. The dream.org prize will enable us to scale to the 40% of low-income defendants who are not represented by institutional public defenders. In this next phase, we plan to serve assigned council plans all across the country. We're a highly technical team that brings engineering experience from organizations like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. We've built justice text hand in hand with hundreds of public defenders across the country. And we hope you'll join us in scaling this work. Thank you. Great presentation. As you're serving this to different public defenders, how do you face issues when you can't get access to the footage or something like that? That's a really good question. And I think one of the structural issues that we didn't realize is that even getting access to discovery is a challenge in many different jurisdictions. Police and prosecutors have outsized power and say in when the data is shared and in what formats it's shared. And so honestly, it's been really amazing for us to work side by side with public defenders and making the case to prosecutors why they should be sharing this data in a more timely fashion and in more compatible formats. And from our end, we've actually reverse engineered a lot of the really, really challenging proprietary file formats, which previously used to cause issues for our attorneys so that now they can play it natively within justice text. Thanks. All right. Next up, we have Sabra Williams and Major Bunton, the co-founders of Creative Acts. We come to you not so fresh from our week long virtual reality program in solitary confinement at Corcoran State Prison. Now imagine it's 1990, no cell phones, no computers. You check out at a supermarket with the teller, someone pumps your gas for you and there's no internet or Google. Now take a few seconds and imagine you fast forward and you find yourself in 2023. Everything is computerized. It's like arriving in another country where you don't know the language or the culture. Welcome to the experience of people like me in about 35,000 Californians a year. People returning after life sentences or decades in prison also have to cope with the intentional trauma that prison creates and the shame that accompanies a return. No wonder so many people go back to prison. We can do better than we have begun to. If you want to solve a justice problem that can also change the justice system, you have to think creatively. This is where artists come in. We need some of the most creative minds, some of the most fearless people to radically reimagine our future. Artists have always been on the forefront of movements. Over the decades that we've been working in prisons we've seen a major problem that remains unaddressed and we found a creative solution. How do you bring the outside world inside to help people return home better? And then how do you scale it and make it something that becomes the norm for returning citizens? We know our idea has the potential to both change prison culture and make life safer and traumatic for everyone. And when we say everyone, we mean it. When I was incarcerated, it was easy to see the problem as being the correct officer. They were lazy, violent, abusive, and inhumane. But when I started my change, I began to suspect that just like us, they were acting out their trauma. And when I heard they had the highest suicidal rate of any profession, my suspicions were confirmed. New studies have found that of the 600,000 people released nationally, 40% will have post-incarceration syndrome, a psychiatric disorder that is characterized by a range of psychological, emotional, and social difficulties. We know our existing virtual reality arts programs had a deep impact on just these issues for people who are incarcerated. But what about the people who work in the system? In order to dismantle the prison industrial complex that everyone upholds, everyone has to be activated. Therefore, our innovation is to use the arts and virtual reality to include residents and correctional officers working together in the same room for the very first time. Five residents, five correctional officers will meet for four hours daily for five days with no uniforms, no weapons, first name only to respond to the question, how can we deal with serious harm if there were no police or no prisons? We already have interest nationally and internationally with the right investment. This is an ideal that is ready and easy to scale. We'll use virtual reality to enable them to develop common experiences. We'll use theater, painting, poetry, music, and dance to bring joy and creativity to the process and help them heal trauma. And in a space where they're tackling a question that is so big, they can't hold on to what they know. They will discover that the only thing they have to hold on to is each other. I know what it's like to be traumatized, to live with violence and revenge. But thanks to this work, I also know what it's like to have access to the resources of the arts and tech to transform it. And in the process, to transform a racist, punitive culture. As one of the most violent participants said, I myself was one of the worst inmates here. And this program motivated me to change the way I think and feel about myself, life, and others. This is a game changer. Now imagine if the impact of this innovative idea was the default for the 600,000 people returning home. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for your work. I really appreciate the emphasis in bringing together arts and technology. And I also run a dance company I know about the transformative potential of the arts and how difficult that can be to communicate. And one of the things that you mentioned in your application was having done a pilot and seeing some of the qualitative measures and quantitative measures. I wanted to see if you could share more about some of the outcomes that you've seen and how that influences how you think about scaling. So we work in stories. I'm an actor. So we had the guy in our class who is known as the worst person in CDCR in the prison system. The warden wanted him to do our program. All the COs, all the correctional officers were against him doing it because he has the highest number of infractions in the whole state. But she wanted him out of the shoe. He did 12 years in solitary. So she put him in our program. And he lit up from the first day. And the mental health professionals came to us on day three and said, I don't know what you're doing, but whatever you're doing, it needs to be everywhere in the prison. And this is a mental health program. So after the program, this guy was released from the shoe first time in 12 years. He went to the main line in another prison. And without our knowledge, he wrote to the governor and said, I've never done a program before. This is the only thing I've experienced in what 30 years of being incarcerated that has ever worked. He said, you're investing so much money in things. Why are you not investing? And that was quote from him in what works. And he's out now. He's out of solitary confinement. He's back on the main line doing good. And server here's an example for other people who are like, you know, if he can do it, anyone can do it. That's how we measure our success. There are numbers as well. But we measure our success in individual human transformation. Thank you. Thank you. Next up, we have today Tatum Edwards with free cap. Hi, so cap. My name is today. And I am the founder and CEO of free cap financial. I grew up in a small town in rural Florida, where some of the smartest people I know were pipeline to prison instead of college, including my little brother. I spent over a decade studying the prison industrial complex, and I built a career in asset management to help end it. There's a network of companies that have a direct financial incentive to keep people behind bars. And it's not just private prisons. It's companies who use prison labor in their supply chain and then turn around and refuse to hire those same returning citizens when they come home looking for work. At free cap, we believe we can disrupt this cycle of harmful profit incentives by mobilizing investors. As long as incarceration remains profitable, companies will always find ways to undermine our reform goals. Our team is gathering data to bring unprecedented transparency to the criminal justice footprint of over 3,000 companies. We built the first and only data set that quantifies how much money companies make from profiting off of prisons. But we don't stop there. We also work with justice-involved communities to figure out what policies and practices companies can actually adopt to help us reduce recidivism. We launched our data system subscription service in January, and I'm very excited to share that it's already making waves in the market. It took us less than six months from launch to secure a multi-year licensing agreement with a tier one enterprise bank, and our data is influencing nearly $10 billion in the market currently. Today, we're here seeking your support to turn this data into a financial index and exchange-traded fund. The free index will measure corporate impact on justice-involved people. Companies who are the best at hiring returning citizens while reducing their prison footprint will receive the highest ratings and be included in the index each year. A financial index can help us make prison risk a material financial metric. It'll make more transparent which companies are leading in this space and expose those who are lagging, and we know this level of transparency can shape corporate behavior. Just look at Walmart as a case study. They received backlash from consumers and investors in 2020 because of their history of prison labor in their supply chain. And now, just three years later, they're partnering with reentry service providers across the country to actively recruit and hire formerly incarcerated workers. Walmart's commitments to fair chance hiring moved them from a mid-tier company in our data set to now being an industry leader. Walmart is not the only folks who are doing this. We're seeing many more companies committing to second chance hiring, and to our knowledge, we're the only people who are actively tracking this for investors. We're also seeing momentum in the social responsible investing space. 80% of investors plan to increase their allocation to ESG funds over the next two years, and by 2026, there will be $33 trillion invested in these type of funds. We have the rare opportunity to turn decarceration into a global investing movement. Imagine a world where instead of investing in prisons, the money that you already have sitting in the stock market can help us defund the prison industrial complex and reduce recidivism. Together, with the free index, we can make that possible. Hey, how you doing? It's great, great pitch. So I just have a simple question. When I think about investing, what is the barrier to entry, and what are you doing to lower that barrier or remove that barrier? That's a great question. Right now, one of the reasons we applied to this prize is because the data that we have currently is only accessible to high net worth individuals in separately managed accounts. We want everyone at any dollar amount to be able to invest in decarceration. So with an exchange-shaded fund, that can be hosted on Robinhood, that can be in your 401k account. And so anyone that has a dollar to invest in the stock market would be able to participate in the strategy. All right. Last but not least, we have Kevin Scott from Just Income. This is the homeless shelter in the city that I live in. And when I got out of prison, I actually slept in the parking lot because this place is actually a decommissioned prison. And the thought of swapping one set of bars for another was just too much for me to bear. So that's how I came home. Freedom was so complicated. There were tears of joy when I finally hugged my daughter again and when I felt the ocean. And there were tears of terror. Reincarceration loomed over me because I couldn't afford the cost of my own probation. That's not just my experience. It's terribly common. My name is Kevin Scott. I'm now the program director of Just Income, created by and for formerly incarcerated people in Gainesville, Florida. We understand these challenges because we have walked the same path. Florida, like much of the South, is steeped in racism and mass incarceration. Florida prisoners are forced into unpaid labor under constant threat of violence. After we come home, we face dismal job prospects, rampant homelessness, and the lasting trauma of incarceration. Add on to that fees for supervision, ankle monitors, drug testing and more. Florida weaponizes those fines and fees. So the inability to pay means reincarceration with suffocating. Where we live, 23% of probation violations are just due to a lack of money. The crime is your bank account. You are too poor to be free. But what if we offered people coming out of incarceration some unconditional financial support? Just Income does exactly that. In our pilot year, we gave 115 recently released people $1,000 a first month and 600 a month for the next 11 months. No strings attached. And please know this. 90% of our recipients had less than $50 when we started. And they defied stereotypes, using their income to secure employment, housing, healthcare, and eliminate correctional debt. This led to a radical 43% decrease in money related reincarceration. People are free because they're no longer too poor. We've shown that by directly investing in people, we could save millions in a system that is hemorrhaging billions on violations. Guaranteed income is not a new concept. Dr. King saw it as a tool to address economic and racial disparities. Unrestricted income allows people to make their own choices as experts in their own lives. This is my dear friend, V. For years, she was trapped in a cycle of poverty, homelessness, addiction, abuse, and incarceration. With the flexibility of a guaranteed income, she was able to get into stable housing, address her addiction, take online classes, get certified for work, and she reunited with her children. And as she says, hope goes a long way for people who are accustomed to hopelessness. Our recipients feel valued because we trust them and believe in their inherent potential to chart their own courses. For way too many, this is not reentry. This is entry for the very first time. So Florida openly hostile to formerly incarcerated people is where we've taken a stand. But our impact is not just local. We are a blueprint that can be replicated. We've already been sought out by over 20 organizations and jurisdictions eager to adopt our approach, including right here in this city. We've even developed an e-learning platform to help bridge the gap of understanding between those who've experienced reentry and those who have not. Beyond just giving people aid, we tackle systemic issues. And we've had some big wins. We have Florida's first fair chance hiring ordinance, free phone calls from the county jail, and an end to discretionary jail please. So we have reduced recidivism, keeping people out of cages and money in the community. There is a long road ahead, but as the experts on the ground with our strong connections across the south and beyond, just income is now poised for growth. Daring to income puts people coming out of incarceration like I once did and charge of our own destinies. And as it turns out, we do know what we're doing. Thank you for listening. Kevin, thank you so much for the presentation. It's clear how impactful this is on individual people. I'm wondering to scale up nationally though, it seems pretty resource intensive. Can you talk about how you plan to do that? Yeah, absolutely. So the way we look at it is local initiative cities are like laboratories for broader national policy. So by continuing to show the effectiveness of this work and the fact that it's spreading, other cities are now eager to duplicate this work, we can start to build a broader case for how this is actually effective in a more wise use of public resources. So we're starting on a local level and improving, sort of approving ground to then contribute to the larger national conversation. And one thing we think that really makes this unique is the fact that the money is no strings attached for a lot of people in incarceration. There's so much compliance, control, constriction, even support you may get after release. It tends to be a bit of a caveat. We will support you if you check this box. This has none of that. Our money is 100% no strings attached and people have really identified with that sense of that agency. I feel like I'm actually being honored and trusted and it's allowed people to have more capacity to show up to county commission meetings, city commission meetings and actually start to participate in more like civic engagement. So we see this as starting small with ripples that could be especially profound nationally. Yeah, one more round of applause for all five panelists if we could. And as they get up, we're going to go backstage. So a round of applause for our judges for their work. We're going to go backstage and deliberate and discuss. And while we do that, we are privileged to introduce to you two leaders in the criminal justice space. Jolene Foreman is the chief program officer at the Just Trust. You can come out Jolene. And Ken Oliver is the vice president of Checker and the executive director of Checker Foundation. Come on out. And these are two people who have spent a lot of time thinking about the challenges, the opportunities and the direction of the criminal justice field. So because they're both expert, we don't even need a moderator. We're just going to have a fireside chat with the two of them to talk about where they see the field going and how this can fit in and be part of it. And you'll see me in a few minutes. Thank you. Take it away. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. What a great set of entrepreneurs creating some innovative solutions for criminal justice reform in the United States. I just wanted to have everybody give one more round of applause for these people. So first I'd like to, my name is Ken Oliver and I'd like to introduce a friend of mine, Jolene, who's a leader in this space, and have her tell you just a little bit about the work that she's done and what brought her to the work and why, after you do that introduction, why this work is important to support entrepreneurs and get more social investment into entrepreneurs and criminal justice reform. Thank you, Ken. I'm Jolene Foreman. I'm the chief program officer of the Just Trust. We are an organization that is 100% dedicated to aligning, scaling, and deploying resources to the criminal justice reform advocacy ecosystem. So we received a $350 million historic startup investment to work extremely hard to help build a new vision for criminal justice, one that works harder to keep people out of the system than to keep them in. And these innovative ideas that we heard today are some of those key solutions. So we first and foremost fund advocacy. We fund criminal justice reform advocacy to help reduce and like right size the scale of the criminal justice system. We do that nationally and we do that in states like Kentucky, West Virginia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. And that's just the first step in the process. We are experiencing a shrinking philanthropic field across the board right now. And so it means that it's harder to pass those types of reforms than ever. So we need more investment, but we also need investments that take those solutions all the way through to the end. So let's say in Alabama, we're working on a decarcerative effort right now. We got to make sure that those people that get released from prison who are safely released from prison have the opportunity to thrive, not just survive when they're out. That means programs like the one that you just heard about that offers basic income. So people have the opportunity to get the job training and job placement that they need, which they can't get when they're just released to the streets without the training or education that they deserve while incarcerated. It also means programs like we heard about that actually offer quality job training and education while incarcerated. So those are just a few quick thoughts that I want before I go on more. I'd love to turn it back to Ken to hear a little bit more about you and your initial reaction. I appreciate that. Innovation, entrepreneurship is something very near and dear to my own heart, especially in this space. When I first came home after serving 24 years in a California prison, almost nine of those in solitary confinement, I entered into a reentry house in Berkeley, California that mirrored the prison environment. The conditions were horrific. I was moved into a five bedroom house with 17 individuals living there bunk bed stacked on top of each other because it was a pay for play model at $5,000 ahead to get as many people in the house as possible. I really started to think what freedom looked like and I started to think about what reentry looked like and what it should look like and how to support folks who were reintegrating into the community after serving 10, 15, 20, 30 years in some cases. After a brief stand as a policy director, I started thinking about innovation and entrepreneurship and how could we change the system and partnered with the state of California and the legislature to build out a $30 million model that was based on tech training and reskilling and upskilling justice impact with people and working with employers to teach them how to bring in change management for fair chance employees, et cetera. I'm near and dear to all these entrepreneurs. It's an affair of the heart. It's hard work, but it's necessary work. There was a number up there that I hope was telling to everybody here in the audience and that was that $1.2 million, $1.2 trillion of investment that America makes in the carceral system per year in this country. That includes police officers. That includes court systems. That includes mass incarceration at state and federal prison level. And so when we think about investment, right, to counterbalance the $1.2 trillion with a T, investment is needed from the philanthropic level to support solutions that are going to build healthier communities and restore lives. So for me, investing in people over profits and punishment is something that's desperately needed in this space. I think there was a statistic up there. There's 80 million people in America that have a rest record. The Justice Department says that's going to be 100 million people by 2030, which is 36% of the American workforce. And so when we think about the future of work and we think about the future of economic growth in this country, we need to change the paradigm and the model of this notion of civil death, where we're stopping people from being able to be successful once they have made a mistake or a poor choice in their life and allow them to rebuild their own lives and their communities' lives. Can you talk a little bit more about the need for private investment to create those second chances that you were just talking about? Sure. So the philanthropic community typically hasn't been big on post-incarceration issues. So everyone talks about pre-incarceration or what happens during incarceration. We talk about defund. We talk about abolition. We talk about advocacy. And all those things are amazing and needed. But what is not talked about as often is what happens after we're successful doing all those things. Like people are going back to their communities. People are going back to the same circumstances that in many cases led them to prison to begin with. And what it is is it's a failure in our part to recognize that the number one driver of mass incarceration and recidivism is poverty. And when people don't have access to, when people don't have access to basic needs, that's all everybody wants, right? Everyone wants to be able to take care of their kids and pay rent and be able to get transportation and those types of things. When you don't have access, then there's all these symptoms that grow out of that soil, right? That result in mass incarceration, over-policing, et cetera. And I tell people often that like I've never met a person no matter where they come from, right? No matter what circumstances that if you, if you give them a livable wage job, restore dignity and pride and ownership, that they didn't stay off the streets. Like I just don't know anybody that's not done that. And so really for me, my first foray into getting an investment was with the state. But I tell often I share with private philanthropists across the country that we need to invest and work for solutions. There's many symptoms that grow out of some of these things we're talking about. But the number one thing in my mind is work and access to the middle class economy and economic mobility. So we need to invest in rescaling and upskilling programs. We need to find ways where we can partner with state governments, the private sector, and philanthropy to create these solutions for folks that the prison system is not designed to create. We need to look at workforce housing solutions. We need to look for universal basic income solutions. And we can't do that alone. The state can't carry that burden by themselves. The federal government can't carry that burden by themselves. And that's why there's such a huge need from philanthropy to invest in these entrepreneurs and invest in solutions that ultimately are going to have a huge, huge ROI, maybe not in the VC sense, but in the community and society sense, there's a tremendous drain on the economy. There's a tremendous absence of billions of dollars that aren't pouring into our local economies and are draining us tax wise for these safety nets and these mass incarceration policies. And I know you guys do a lot of this work as well. And so I'd love for you to be able to talk a little bit about why this is important on the pre-incarceration side. During incarceration, you guys do a lot of clean slate stuff. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what the Just Trust has done. And I know CZI, who was the predecessor to the Just Trust, did so much work in California. And for those of us from California, I just really want to thank what you and Anna have done at CZI before you guys transitioned to the Just Trust. So thank you for the work you guys have done. So we are largely focused on funding the advocacy ecosystem. So the folks that are working tirelessly to help reduce the number of people entering the system and to help people safely exit. We also at the same time are trying to build up solutions that will make a that will really transform what the justice system looks like. Solutions that prevent people from entering the system in the first place, such as pre-trial restorative justice, diversion and deflection and community violence prevention and intervention. And those solutions have been around for a long time and they are largely proven, but they're not always proven with like RCTs, which is often like with kind of traditional empirical research studies, which is often what the government needs to scale these solutions to the level where they could replace much of the existing criminal justice system. And so this is a place where philanthropy and private investment can really work hand in hand. It's an opportunity for private investors to test these innovative solutions that prevent people from entering the system in the first place, that dramatically reduce gun violence, that keep communities safer, help create tracks to employment, help communities really thrive and make them more functional and help community members feel safer in them. So then the government can invest and really replicate and scale them nationally at the level that we need the government ultimately to do. Philanthropy and private investors aren't going to do this on their own, but what they can do is they can demonstrate proof of concept. So that's kind of on the front end because we're really focused on what we call our community safety solutions program that is really stemming the flood of people entering, but we work along the whole spectrum of the criminal justice system. We invest in back-end solutions to like the Clean Slate Initiative that automates record clearance for people with past convictions. And, you know, for example, one of the early campaigns when we were still incubated at CZI before we spun out and became the Just Trust, one of the early campaigns was supporting the work in Utah, and I'm not sure if Nicole Sudbury is in the room right now or not. I see her waving. She was instrumental in like inside government being a huge advocate for passing that law, and that law did so much to restore dignity to people with past criminal records and create pathways to getting jobs and employment, but it didn't fill the whole gap. So Noella's actually a Dream.org fellow for her public benefit organization called RASA, and they actually take that policy that needed to be done through advocacy and through philanthropic dollars and be passed in the legislature, and they're now going and clearing people's records that were left behind, the people that fell through the cracks of that system, so that more people can get jobs and thrive post-incursion. Yeah, that was amazing work. Can we give it up for her? Thank you. I guess I'll just chime in and talk a little bit about also the work that we do at the Checker Foundation and at Checker, which is kind of counterintuitive to most people when I tell them that Checker is like the leading background check company in America. They're like, Ken, what are you doing over at the background check company? The interesting thing about Checker is they're the biggest fair chance employer in the state of California. We have over 60 formerly incarcerated people that are working in our tech office right down the street. And it's really amazing the founders of the company, being in the background check space, they saw the disparate impact, especially on Black and Brown, formerly incarcerated people with records and really wanted to change the narrative. And so they started that not by talking about it, which is really impressive to me. They actually just started by doing it. They didn't advocate. They didn't look for an op-ed piece or any PR. They just hired somebody that just got out of prison after doing 20 years. And they iterated. They had some mistakes. They didn't understand language. But then they doubled down and hired a second person and then a third and then a fifth. And now we're at 5% of our workforces, formerly incarcerated people. So at the foundation, what we do is we fund nonprofit organizations for the most part who are involved with workforce development. And so we understand that apprenticeship models, paid internship models, reskilling and upskilling is the pathway to economic mobility. And that's our major goal is how do we get people who have traditionally been marginalized out of the economy and get them pathwayed to middle class jobs? Only because we've seen the results at Checker. They've hired over 70 people lifetime and we've only had like two people leave. And that's because they got promotions at other companies. And so, you know, these, these folks have shown a tremendous amount of loyalty. They've shown a tremendous amount of reskilling and learning and development while they're at the company. In fact, at Checker, the former incarcerated people that we have promote 60% faster and farther than people who are coming out of Stanford and Berkeley at this tech company. So it's really, it's really a nod to showing that when you get people access to play in different playgrounds and access to work and you have an inclusive environment in your workplace that people thrive and they do well and they contribute to their local economies and to their own families. So that's some of the work that we do on the workforce side because we think that's a major spoke in the wheel of decarceration policy, right? The way that you decarcerate is by giving people access to work and to provide for themselves and some economic mobility. That number alone about promotion was just so exciting to hear. I just want to pause on that for one moment and give it another round of applause. Thank you. Speaking of decarcerative policies, the advocacy ecosystem nationally has been incredibly successful in the last 15 years, but this movement is still pretty new and it needs and would benefit from more innovation and something really special and unique about the social capital model is that it allows for more innovation. It allows for more experimentation and creativity and it allows for thinking kind of beyond just the legislative solutions and so I'm eager to learn more. I'm new to this space and to hear how kind of traditional philanthropy and this type of innovation can work hand in hand to really help decarcerate like you were just talking about Ken and help people thrive on the back end so that we have a positive feedback loop instead of the negative feedback loop of people being released not being set up for success and then looping back into the system not because they don't want to be free but because they don't have the resources to stay out. 100% I mean the way that I approach this work and us at checker.org approach the work is we basically feel like our theory of change is based on three kind of flywheels of investment opportunity that can make this thing work and the number one thing is the re-skilling and up skilling some of which you saw some of the entrepreneurs talked about here today Jessica with the coding program that they have and there's many other organizations that are investment worthy who are investing heavy dollars in re-skilling and upskilling for folks that's very important because there's a skills gap that the prison system in this country doesn't look like a college campus it looks like a warehouse and so they are not teaching market driven skill sets in the prison environment they expect people to serve large amounts of time and then get out to a place where the whole digital landscape has changed like people ask me like what kind of skill sets do people have and I said you know most of my homies um have never seen google drive they've never turned on a zoom call they've never turned on a computer or a laptop before right and so how do we bridge those gaps where even in the automotive industry you need computer literacy right how do we do that um that's a very important imperative and probably the first flywheel in this matrix the second one is employers and to be perfectly honest employers need to be re-skilled and upskilled on how to source talent and how to get away from this idea that you have to go to UC Berkeley in order to be worthy of a job right especially in the tech sector in the knowledge-based economy um we really spend a lot of time working with employers and we think employers need to be worked with to fold this into their broader D&I strategy most companies at this point assuming that we're all growing up as companies have a digital I mean a diversity and inclusion strategy this is an important piece of it and I tell folks all the time that you know if you exclude 80 million people who have a record away from your workforce then that's not really an inclusion policy it sounds like an exclusion policy to me so we feel like investment in that area to invest in educating employers in corporate America to make a new bottom of the bell curve is important and that's there's a lot of great organizations that are doing that work and then the third piece of it is policy because policy can undergird both of those first two wheels right how can I just met with the governor of um Indiana and you know talk to him about how can we create more public and private partnerships right how can we get government to support employers with insurance policies right negatives and hiring indemnity policies things that can give employers incentive to take that leap because we've created this narrative you know we've created this like a scare tactic narrative for the last 50 or 60 70 years um and then also policy can support the reskilling efforts of folks right it's one of the things we did when we partnered with the government has talked about a new model that gives people marketable skill sets right we can't expect people to pathway into the middle class economy if the if the skill deficit is as wide as it is um so those are some of the investable areas that I see when it comes to post incarceration I know there are a lot on the front end with what you do so maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the investment areas that you see especially since you run such a big fund um what those areas might be for folks so first before I say what they might be I want to say what they shouldn't be I think one place that private investment has really scaled in the serena is in private prisons and in state control whether it's like monitoring people with ankle bracelets or through biometrics and I think that that is that is what it is but there it's limited in in its creativity and its ability to actually solve the solutions none of those things actually make us safer what makes us safer is preventing crimes it is um investing in accountability and repairing harm much like those kind of front end solutions that I was telling you were invested in and so there are opportunities for the private sector to scale innovative ways to work in communities to advance these models of safety and prevention and healing that actually do help community safety and well-being and create a criminal justice system that reflects kind of the values that we all want to see in the society yeah for sure that's amazing thank you for that um I think we have coming up you ready thank you okay come on I think that's our time we're going to get pulled off um like sandmen at the Apollo it's our time it's time for the judges to come out with their results so appreciate you guys spending some time with us in this fireside chat i'm a round of applause for joe lean and ken thank you guys all right so for you know for those of us who joined late you know this is at the culmination of a year-long process uh the five finalists I think we all they all did great I just want to use this opportunity to remind everybody that we talk about investing in these ideas and people like this we've got investment that can come from people in this room we also have 90 billion dollars that this country spends on prisons jails probation and parole we think that that money should be going towards the people that you heard from today not the people that are causing harm in our prison system and so that's really our goal when we talk about justice innovation I also want to give a couple thank yous uh you know it's always uh the people who aren't on the program who do all the work right so I want to give a shout out to Michael Bernarding our justice innovation manager who's been running this process for the last year I also want to take a moment to thank carrot carrot is the vendor that runs prize competitions across the country in fact uh the world and they were instrumental partners with us from start to finish so thank you carrot for making this happen and of course thank you to socap for having us this is just a delight to be on this stage so uh I'm gonna welcome out to share a little bit about what comes next and how you can work with us the ceo of dream.org thank you so much for coming out I can't believe I'm in the position where we're giving away a million dollars as being a struggling non-profit for my entire career this feels really exciting and the reason yes right and the reason why we did this is this field of innovation and justice it is a new brand new field and at dream.org we want to dream we want to think what's possible we want a future that works for everybody and so being able to ignite some of these dreams um it's beautiful I'm really excited that y'all are here with me today I have the envelope with the winners but before I announce I want to um ask all of y'all that are interested and being part of this movement to stay after we can't be in this room so we're gonna go right across the way there's a stairway that goes up to a beautiful city view I think it might be called city view walkway where all of the people you heard pitched today will be there to mingle and we will be there the dream.org staff we want to invite you into this brand new field because there are so many ideas out there just the applications we got in were amazing and these five winners um they've already won some support but they're gonna need a lot more support to grow and so my call to action for y'all that come over is one be their champions for the folks who haven't won the folks who have won give them the introductions funding is definitely acceptable I'm sure and help us champion this field being viable and important especially when we're talking about social impact investing and to just join us our dream.org staff will be there and we would love to invite you in and build what's next we'd love to do the prize again if we have funding but we also know that we're building to something bigger which Yanis has been talking about that radical transformation okay join us cross the way yeah and now the big moments uh in in no specific order the three winners who are going to get the uh $250,000 each the first winner is I've always wanted to open an envelope like this unlocked labs this second winner is justice text and the third winner is free cap financial uh and one more round of applause for all of our finalists our judges and everybody thank you for being here please join us after