A New Underground Railroad

“We need a new underground railroad today.”

— Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow

In America, roughly 700,000 men and women are released from prison into our communities every year. But without access to new relationships and opportunities, with many barriers to “reentry,” most remain in the “underground” street economy. They eventually get arrested, and sucked back into the prison system, disenfranchised and dead to society.

Michelle Alexander, in her groundbreaking book, The New Jim Crow: Colorblindness In An Age of Mass Incarceration, calls for "a new underground railroad."

Like the mass movement before the collapse of slavery in the South, Alexander says we need a new movement of homes, churches, informal networks within communities to embrace and route people out of captivity today.

This is what we are building, together.