We equip communities to embrace people as they return from prison.
MASS INCARCERATION =
MASS DISCONNECTION
WE HEAL TOGETHER
We embrace the incarcerated and gang-affected—those most feared, and most wounded.
Prisons are our nation’s subconscious: where we cut off, bury and hide our collective wounds. Disconnection and punishment won’t heal us.
We're building a movement of mass relationship-building: a new department of connections. When neighbors, friends, lawyers, churches, employers, and schools build better relationships with folks returning from prison, those with a fatal lack of hope find the community and support they need to heal.
And we believe this culture of belonging leads to deeper healing—and safety—for the whole community.
What if every person releasing from prison had a local community waiting to embrace them?
WE DO JUST THAT
Embracing new friends leaving the “tombs” of prison—often called “reentry work”—is like practicing resurrection.
We’ve been doing that with gang-affected folks in Washington State’s Skagit Valley for over twenty years. Our local gang reentry and healing community is called Underground Healing: now fully staffed and led by a team of formerly-incarcerated reentry navigators.
Through One Parish One Prisoner, we mobilize faith communities across Washington and beyond to do everything we do—practice resurrection, we say—in faithful relationship with just one person releasing from prison into their town.
Mass incarceration is bigger than these two programs of ours. So Movement Building is our broader investment in regional partnerships and national conversations—shifting the narrative from fear to embrace.
OUR MISSION
Underground Ministries opens new relationships of embrace and trust between the incarcerated and the communities to which they return—for our mutual transformation and resurrection.
-
Mass incarceration is mass disconnection. We can only throw people away that we do not know. But when we know—and love—one person inside the lockup system, it becomes natural to dismantle the barriers between us.
-
Embrace is more than just “welcoming” someone—it is an invitation, a closer connection between people, where they can feel accepted for who they are—even the unpleasant history, or unfinished growth.
Trust goes both ways in our communities. It is extended and earned through honesty, vulnerability, and sharing of hard truths. It is established through responsibility and ownership between people.
-
It is when the formerly incarcerated and the communities to which they return enter into healing together not by fixing each other, but by sharing their own wounds and fears, alongside each other.
-
“Reentry” and “reintegration” are fairly recent social work terms. Why not embrace a much larger imagination and mystery: welcoming those “dead” to us back into wholeness and life in community together? Reentry work helps a person. Resurrection work transforms a society.
PRACTICE RESURRECTION
After years of helping folks leaving prison find community and support, we asked ourselves: What if every person in prison had their own local reentry team?
It could empty the prison tombs. It could transform every community.
Then we created One Parish One Prisoner to do just that.
One Parish One Prisoner (OPOP) pairs individuals releasing from prison with 7-10 person teams in their home region. Together, they embark on a 2-year journey of relationship-building, holistic reentry support, and mutual transformation.
REENTRY & HEALING
Underground emerged from decades of chaplaincy, friendship, and prison reentry among those most excluded and demonized in Skagit County, Washington: gang-impacted men and women.
We believe these courageous folks rebuilding their lives after prison are societal leaders. They show us what it looks like to vulnerably drop all you’ve known, own your role in your community’s wounds, choose to trust those you were taught to hate, and learn a new way of living together.
Underground Healing’s holistic prison reentry program—and peer support community—is now now fully staffed and led by those who’ve emerged from prisons and gangs, themselves, and are now leading others in healing.
COMMUNITY PARTNERS
HOW WE GOT STARTED
In 2005, Underground Ministries' founder Chris Hoke started visiting the local jail in Washington’s Skagit Valley as a volunteer chaplain.
The gang-affected men he met there invited him into their hearts, their stories, and out into the hidden underworld of the rural community. They dubbed him their “pastor” even when he didn’t like that word.
Through long-distance prison letters—often from solitary confinement cells—they created networks of new friendship that wove their worlds together, slowly forging reentry pathways out of the American underground.
Nearly two decades later, Alex Sanchez (left) has emerged from a life of gangs, addiction, and maximum-security prisons to now lead Underground Healing, our ongoing reentry services among gang-impacted men and women here in Skagit County.
JOIN THE MOVEMENT
START A TEAM
Be part of the new Underground railroad with your community.
Folks are releasing from prison into your county every week—feeling incredibly vulnerable and uncertain. If you feel curious but unsure if you have what it takes to do this, then you’ve already got something in common with your releasing neighbor!
We heal and become something greater together. Never alone.
Tell us a bit about your community, and we can help you start your One Parish One Prisoner team today.
FUEL A TEAM
For just $40/month ($500/year), you can provide someone leaving prison with a loving, local team who will help them:
✔ Find local housing, transportation, and employment
✔ Get professional help with mental illness and drug addiction
✔ Attain their driver's license
✔ Comply with court and agency appointments
✔ Raise $5,000 within their church for reentry barriers/costs
✔ Be there for the long walk together
It costs taxpayers $41,000 to keep one person in prison every year. It costs us just $500 to recruit, pair, and launch a One Parish One Prisoner team.
Invest in a better solution—a community where we belong to each other.
