Learning New Skills Can Change Your Life

Part II: Helping Former Felons Forge a Path to Employment

In Part I of this series, we focused on Girls Who Code, an organization that is helping to close gender and race gaps in science, math, engineering, and technology through skill-based education. Other nonprofits utilize this tactic to bridge institutional gaps; for example, The Last Mile is an organization that tackles the issues of recidivism and rehabilitation by teaching incarcerated men to code. With the goal of equipping underprivileged Californian prisoners with the skills they need to reenter the job market post-release, their program teaches everything from HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Python to web design and data visualization. Because 76% of prisoners are rearrested within five years of their release, skill-based education is vital to break the cycle of incarceration and help these men re-enter their communities. As most of the inmates were imprisoned before the rise of the Internet, The Last Mile provides them with hope and the in-demand skills that would otherwise remain out of their reach.

Despite the presence of programs like The Last Mile, there are still countless obstacles that impede those with felony convictions from gaining employment. We looked into our own policies about hiring former felons, and found that there are no limitations. However, many of our clients, especially those in highly-regulated industries, require extensive background checks that often end up excluding those with certain types of convictions. Organizations such as Help For Felons and Jail to Job have formed in an effort to combat this and help those who are ready to return to work but unable to find any.

Keep an eye out for our final installment in this series, which will focus on the role of skill-based education in helping displaced coal mine workers to find alternative means of employment.

Thanks to Milo Goodman for his contribution to this story.

Learning New Skills Can Change Your Life was originally published in Gymnasium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.