Temple Alumni New Project Proposal

The Inside-Out Alumni group at Temple University is gearing up to begin an exciting new program working with a Re-Entry Project. The project is still in the development phase, but things are moving quickly toward implementation through a collaboration with the Community College of Philadelphia.

Here's the proposal for their project:

The Temple University alumni group of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program is proposing an “Inside-Out”-inspired workshop series with participants of the Community College of Philadelphia -Cambria Re-Entry Pilot. Our vision of the project incorporates Inside-Out values, processes, and parameters applied to an ongoing project that would include the inside participants of the Cambria Pilot as well as Temple University and CCP Inside-Out alumni in weekly dialogues about crime and justice as it pertains to course work assigned by CCP in their respective pilot. Our hope is that this will not only offer constructive and innovative programming for the inside participants, but will also allow previous Inside-Out outside participants to continue to engage what they learned about dialogue, encounters with individuals of different backgrounds, and the setting of correctional institutions. Moreover, the intent is to complement the Cambria pilot in a fashion that will facilitate the success of all involved in this innovative effort with an overarching synchronicity in motivation and outcome.

We envision the project to consist of a once-a-week workshop (ten weeks) involving conversations about subject matter with a unifying theme. We will begin this series in mid-January. While there will be a facilitator designated to maintain focus and to facilitate dialogue, there will not be a single leader of the class, but rather group ownership (a shared collective) of the material and the conduct of the workshops. The workshops will be based on intergroup dialogue and conducted in a circle format as are Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program classes, with one-on-one and small group discussions along with large group dialogue. Ideally, the group will include equal numbers of outside and inside participants, so that all participants can feel on an equal footing with one another. Realistically, according to the numbers to date, the outside members comprise about six to ten members. We plan to hold a series of recruitment presentations at Inside-Out final classes in the upcoming week in an effort to bolster membership for Temple’s group and the CCP pilot project.

More information about this project coming soon!

Funding Request to all Inside-Out members

Greetings,

A couple of weeks ago, I emailed our latest newsletter to you, along with the request to consider making a donation to Inside-Out. Thank you to those who have responded so far. This is a follow-up, in the face of all the mad busyness of December, because we honestly need your help.

We are at a really critical juncture. To sustain Inside-Out for the next few months, as we continue to plot a very exciting future, we hope that you’ll consider a donation to keep the program going full-steam in the interim. Can you donate $250, or pool gifts from a few enthusiastic friends or associates to equal that amount or more?

In fact, your gift will pack a double punch. We have an amazing challenge from a donor right now – if we raise $20,000, this person will match it dollar for dollar.

Inside-Out needs your help this winter to make the transition to a financially sustainable program. As you know, the program has grown tremendously in a few short years. Thanks in large part to your work on the ground, Inside-Out has already affected the lives of at least 8,000 inside and outside students.

Yet, just as this growth has opened up the doors to incredible new possibilities, it has also put a real strain on our infrastructure. We are in the midst of a strategic planning process designed to build on our success and expand our impact into the future. To do the planning right takes time: we are working hard to map out the wisest, most comprehensive, sustainable, and productive path going forward.

Due to the economic crisis, we have not received the grant funding we were hoping for this year to carry us through this strategic planning phase and into the future. We have identified several very promising funding possibilities that should be within reach with a few more months of concerted work.

To realize these opportunities while providing continued support to instructors and alumni, we need to raise $50,000 by February 15th. We are turning to you, our core supporters, to help us out. If you – and anyone you know – could donate anything at all to the program, from $50 to $5,000, it would make a huge difference.

We hope you’ll share the appeal and newsletter that we sent a couple weeks back with friends, family, colleagues, former students, and others who might be likely to support Inside-Out as we continue to create new opportunities for dialogue and collaborative education.

How to donate: http://www.insideoutcenter.org/donate.html

In some important ways, we have begun to change lives and the prison system. We want the Inside-Out Center to be able to continue to offer support and community to all instructors and alumni – in fact, we want to offer you more meaningful support and engagement over time, and to push forward our promising new initiatives, which started in such a grassroots way. Please help us keep this program strong, focused on our core values and our mission – as urgent now as it has ever been. Thanks so much.

Have a wonderful holiday,

Lori Pompa

Fall 2010 Inside-Out Newsletter

The second national newsletter for the Inside-Out Program has arrived!  It features content from the Pacific Northwest, as well as news about alumni programs.  Please be sure to check it out. 

Inside-Out in Oregon Campus Publication

This Inside-Out Program in Oregon received some excellent press this week in the magazine Oregon Quarterly.  The article includes testimony from James, one of the most involved Inside alumni at the Oregon State Penitentiary. 

Check out the article on pages 16-17 here!

If your local Inside-Out classes have received media coverage, please let us know so we can publicize it!  Email us a link at nationalinsideoutalumni@gmail.com, or post a comment here. 

Alumni guidelines documents coming soon

A few of us at the national level are working to create a set of guidelines and "best practices" for future alumni programs.  We want to help all alumni be involved and feel welcome to add insite and innovation to the national program.  We are working on guidelines for projects that involve both inside and outside alumni, and specific rules about the No Contact policy and how that will allow for "programmatic contact." 

We are also compiling the experience and suggestions of the projects that have already been started (like the Oregon Book Club) to help inspire people in the creation of future projects.  We've learned, for example, that the alumni groups often need one or two point people to get the ball rolling, but that additional structure means that more people start getting involved.  We also know that it really, really helps to receive recognition and support for projects from the Inside-Out Program itself.  That's one place where the national Alumni Group can help.

Hopefully, groups will start coming together across the country very soon.  We'll have instructions and guidelines ready for them.

In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions for what belongs in this document, please contact us by commenting on this post, or by emailing us at nationalinsideoutalumni@gmail.com. 

Chatty Cathy Gets Turned Inside-Out

Sure, I can tell anyone my favorite smell or a movie star I wouldn't mind portraying me in the biography of my life. Orange blossoms and Natalie Portman. See? I don't even know who you are and I'm fine telling you that.

Ask me what it means to forgive someone, ask me about someone I haven't forgiven, ask me about someone I need to ask forgiveness from? And the normally Chatty Cathy in me gets a little less chatty.

Usually, that is.

Unless, for some reason, it's an Inside-Out program and the people surrounding me are participants of a Creative Writing Workshop at Oregon State Penitentiary.

Then it's a different case entirely.

Then we're beginning a day-long conversation and we don't have time to waste on surface-level stuff. We're diving in without a moment to lose.

We were blessed to have Sister Helen Prejean with us for the morning. She shared her own experiences with writing, forgiveness and of course, Cajun jokes.

The energy of the room swelled with her presence and the ease of her conversation and the cadence of her speech warmed our hearts like a good dish of jambalaya.

We sat, inspired and touched, listening to her speak, and then we got to our own writings.

The sharing that followed was a church service in the holiest of temples. Who knew? At a prison. People read their pain out loud. Read their doubt. Read their brokenness, their struggles, their anger.

And in that room on the top floor of the maximum security prison in Oregon, there was peace.

Laughter. Joy. Sharing. And who can say? But I wouldn't doubt that there was quite a bit of hurt that started healing too.

Inside-Out gets me every time. Takes my Chatty Cathy nature and turns it, well, inside out. I'm not just moving my mouth to fill the quiet, but I'm listening attentively and speaking openly with my fellow students.

Ask me about forgiveness? And I'll tell you to take an Inside-Out class.

UO Book Club fall term

We are now halfway through the fall term Inside-Out Alumni Book Club with the youth at Serbu.  This time around we have twelve youth and eight Inside-Out Alumni!  We are reading Calvin and Hobbes, and the term is going amazingly well.  Melissa Crabbe held a second Inside-Out facilitator training for the alumni who are participating, and this was a fabulous opportunity to work through best practices and trouble shooting, in addition to gaining the skills Melissa was teaching.  We are becoming quite the team of alumni together.

Only two I/O alumni were able to participate who had been involved over the summer.  Ted and myself are therefore leading the group, with the new participants as extremely active members of the group.  Five of the youth are participating again from the summer, and only one summer participant chose not to rejoin the group (the others were released).  The more balanced numbers are great: we have done wagon wheels, held small group discussions, and overall had a much more involved and integrated feeling in the room with the balance of youth and I/O Alumni. 

Two weeks ago, we had a half-hour discussion of the ideas of "fate" and "destiny," inspired (of course) by Calvin and Hobbes.  We talked about free will, and about the possibly contradictory idea that everything happens for a reason.  The youth were eloquent on both counts, reflecting both a desire to feel control over their actions and a need for the security of a guiding plan to life.  The level of dialogue, consistent with our own Inside-Out experiences, was much higher than what is often achieved in a college classroom.  On Friday, we discussed war and peace, our tendency to turn violence into entertainment, and the damage this has on individual lives.  People were so willing to be vulnerable, and to ask questions (the comic dealt with Mutually Assured Destruction and the Cold War, which the youth knew nothing about).

We'll see what comes up in the comics next.  I'm hoping to have a conversation about bullying sometime in the next couple of weeks.  I'm also hoping develop a final project, hopefully to include some comic strip writing and drawing of our own. 

If anyone has suggestions for material, projects, or activities, I would love to hear them.  In the meantime, expect more updates soon!

Katie D, University of Oregon

Developing Inside-Out Alumni Guidelines

Hey everyone! There is a developing group of Inside-Out Alumni, working together to put together protocol and guidelines for alumni groups. So far, the leadership is coming from the Inside-Out Center at Temple University in Philadelphia, and at the other strong alumni site in Oregon. We are working together to create not only the guidelines for new groups, but also ideas for how to best support our alumni and to encourage future work on Inside-Out related projects and reflecting those values.

If you have suggestions for us, or want to be involved, please write to us! We can't wait for a time when there are dozens of authors on this blog, and hundreds of voices across the country contributing project ideas and program support.

If you're like me, you know that what you learned in Inside-Out has changed you in a fundamental way. You also probably know that you have learned things that have the potential to change the world. Now the point is to find a way to do that together.

Please send your feedback and suggestions, keep checking this blog, and help get this off the ground!

Write us at nationalinsideoutalumni@gmail.com and encourage your local professors to get involved with the Alumni subcommittee.

Nathional Inside-Out Newsletter

Hello, everyone!

If you haven't gotten a chance to read the first ever national newsletter from the Inside-Out Program, check it out here!

Oregon Book Club a success!

This summer's Alumni Book Club pilot project was a true success.  Four Inside-Out Alumni worked with approximately ten youth, reading The Ultimate Spider-Man.  The group discussed topics as varied as responsibility, teen relationships, trust, gang violence, capitalism, and the makings of a hero.  The reports from all participants were very positive: for the youth it was a chance to add an activity to their days, to read an interesting book, and to talk with new people.  For the alumni, it was a chance to create a new program, engage in dialogue, and learn from the youth about teaching and facilitating.

We learned that working independently of a professor and starting a new program is both difficult and extremely rewarding.  We have developed a very positive working relationship with the staff and leadership of the institution there, and have abundant and growing support for this program at the University, which purchased the books for the class.  We learned a lot about the differences of working with youth as opposed to the adults in Inside-Out classes, and will continue to learn how to best design the program to meet everyone's needs.

Most important, for me, was a chance to get back into the classroom in an Inside-Out format.  I love digging deep meaning out of a simple storyline, and inviting others to respond in kind.  It is obvious that some of the youth have never had any kind of creative space in their own learning, and to be asked their opinion and encouraged to disagree is a novel thing.

We will begin the book club again in October, to run for eight weeks.  We hope to have a larger number of alumni participants, and to generally improve the program.

Please comment with any questions or suggestions!

Alumni Training held at the UO

In preparation for the Serbu book club project, five Inside-Out alumni at the University of Oregon participated in a mini facilitation training hosted by Melissa Crabbe, Inside-Out Assistant National Director.

Over the course of two meetings, we learned basics of group fascilitation and discussed many of the techniques, questions, and potential problems that arise when conducting Inside-Out-style programs. We brainstormed issues that might arise through working with youth instead of adults on the inside, and worked together to troubleshoot our classroom practices. Melissa led us in a discussion about diversity and the difficult conversations that could arise.

In addition to the practical and much-needed information we gained from our six-hour training, we also had a chance to bond as a group of leaders. Inside-Out has an incredible model of self-leadership for trainings, so that we spend most of the training session imagining potential questions or issues, and then brainstorming solutions. Melissa was the facilitator of our collective learning process, which also provided a model for our own class meetings.

As our group grows over the coming year, we hope to hold future trainings for the outside alumni to be trained in leadershp techniques and program ideology and practices. We also hope that someday in the future these trainings might be led by alumni themselves, and that the students in the trainings might eventually include the incarcerated youth who participate in our book club.

All future plans and dreams aside, we entered our first class as leaders with some practical and exciting new skills and group unity. We are so lucky that Melissa is willing and available to help us! I look forward to sharing stories of future training programs in the future.

UO book club at Serbu Juvenile Facility

The Inside-Out Alumni group at the University of Oregon has started a new Inside-Out style project: a book club at the local juvenile facility.

This summer, four UO students and ten youth met weekly for a five-week pilot project book club.  We read comic books together: the outside students identified some graphic novels appropriate for the setting, and the youth selected The Ultimate Spider-Man for the summer book.

Our discussions included topics as varied as revenge, dealing with loss, gender issues, what we would do if we had super powers, relationships, and personal responsibility.  We also used ice breakers and activities to keep everyone engaged and to facilitate the classroom experience.

This pilot project will hopefully evolve into an ongoing and permanent project.  The UO-Serbu partnership has already generated a significant amount of enthusiasm on both sides.  We hope that, in the future, we will have an equal number of inside and outside participants.

Can't wait to see where this leads!

The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program

Inside-Out creates a dynamic partnership between institutions of higher learning and correctional systems in order to deepen the conversation about and transform our approaches to understanding crime, justice, freedom, inequality, and other issues of social concern.
Inside-Out brings college students together with incarcerated men and women to study as peers in a seminar behind prison walls. The core of the Inside-Out Program is a semester-long academic course, meeting once a week, through which 15 to 18 “outside” (i.e.: undergraduate) students and the same number of “inside” (i.e.: incarcerated) students attend class together inside prison. All participants read a variety of texts and write several papers; during class sessions, students discuss issues in small and large groups. In the final month of the class, students work together on a class project.
Inside-Out is an opportunity for college students to go behind the walls to reconsider what they have come to know about crime and justice. At the same time, it is also an opportunity for those inside prison to place their life experiences in a larger framework. Inside-Out creates a paradigm shift for participants, encouraging transformation and change agency in individuals and, in so doing, serves as an engine for social change.
Through college classes and community exchanges, individuals on both sides of prison walls are able to engage in a collaborative, dialogic examination of issues of social significance through the particular lens that is the “prism of prison.”

Check out the national website at http://www.insideoutcenter.org/home.html