Somebody has to stock the pond

Arizona is getting better at preparing people to reenter society after prison. Preparation is not the same as connection.

Arizona releases more than 17,000 people from state prisons each year on average. That number receives a fraction of the attention we give to the sentencing that put them there, yet it is where the return on much of that investment is decided.

For years, the systems surrounding reentry have worked against the outcome we say we want. A person completes a sentence, walks out, and encounters a wall of background checks that can close off housing and employment. No one designed a penalty intended to continue indefinitely after release. Functionally, that is what accumulated. We locked people up, and then we locked them out.

Arizona’s three-year recidivism rate is 29 percent. When people return to prison, taxpayers pay again, families absorb another disruption, and Arizona loses someone who could be contributing to the workforce.

Arizona is making real progress. Governor Katie Hobbs committed the state to Reentry 2030, including goals to increase recognized credentials earned before release and to improve employment one year after release. But preparing someone to work and connecting that person to work are not the same thing.

I see that difference at New Freedom, where I lead vocational and workforce development. We can help someone learn a trade, build a resume, prepare for an interview, and earn a credential. But all of that preparation only matters if there is somewhere for that person to go next.

We all know the saying: Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. What we have learned in reentry is that sometimes you also have to stock the pond.

One of the things that drew me to Valley Leadership is its goal of addressing Arizona’s most pressing issues with an upstream approach. That means instead of only responding to the outcome, we look at the root cause of what produces it and bring the right people together to create real systemic change.

That is the approach Valley Leadership’s Jobs & Economy Impact Team is taking to fair-chance employment.

The first part is employers. We are educating Arizona employers about fair-chance hiring and moving them from being open to the idea to making a real commitment. Research from the Society for Human Resource Management found that 85 percent of HR professionals and 81 percent of business leaders believe workers with criminal records perform as well as or better than workers without them. The question is how we make that employer willingness visible and actionable.

That is where the Fair Chance Employer Badge comes in. Through a bronze, silver, and gold badging system, employers can demonstrate the depth of their commitment to fair-chance hiring. The badge gives employers something concrete to work toward and gives job seekers and reentry providers a way to identify companies that are serious about opening doors.

Then we need a place for those two sides to meet.

For us, that pond is Pipeline AZ.

By housing the badging system within Pipeline AZ, employers willing to hire fair-chance talent can be part of the same workforce network job seekers and providers use. Reentry organizations can point people toward employers who have raised their hands and said, in a visible way, that they are willing to give someone a chance.

At the same time, our Jobs & Economy team is working to get closer to the job seeker. We don’t want someone to finish training, earn a credential, leave a program, and only then start figuring out who might hire them. The goal is to make the employer network visible while that person is still preparing to return to work.

That is what stocking the pond means to me.

The training is teaching someone to fish. The Fair Chance Employer Badge helps us identify and grow the employers willing to hire. Pipeline AZ is the pond where employers and job seekers can find each other. And by bringing reentry providers into that same network, the connection does not depend on whether one case manager happens to know one employer.

That is how we move from individual success stories to a system that can work at scale.

It is also what I value about Valley Leadership. Impact Maker brings leaders, employers, providers, and people closest to an issue together around problems too big for any one organization to solve. Instead of building another program alongside the system, we are strengthening the connections inside the system.

Another 17,000 people will come home in an average year. They are returning to Arizona communities regardless. We can keep teaching people to fish and hope they find somewhere to cast a line, or we can make sure there is a pond stocked with employers ready to hire them.

Somebody has to stock the pond.

That is the work we are doing through Valley Leadership and Impact Maker.

About the author

Justin Proulx is director of vocational and workforce development at New Freedom, where he leads workforce and employment initiatives focused on successful reentry. He brings professional expertise and lived experience with incarceration and reentry to his work expanding fair-chance employment opportunities, and he serves as team lead for Valley Leadership’s Jobs & Economy Impact Team.