January 20, 2012 | Read Time: 1 minute
A curious e-mail message hit my inbox a few days ago.
“I wanted you to hear from me before you heard from someone else,” the writer began. “I am going to prison in February. Like each one of you, I am a broken person. My life is filled with bad decisions, poor excuses, and moral failings.”
Then Jeremy Gregg, executive director of the PLAN Fund, a microfinance group, explains that he is leaving to become chief development officer at the Prison Entrepreneurship Program.
Mr. Gregg says he sent the tongue-in-cheek message to hundreds of friends and colleagues because he wanted to share something he’s learned from volunteering at the seven-year-old prison program: People behind bars aren’t that different from you or me, he says, and they need a hand putting their lives back together.
That’s why the Prison Entrepreneurship Program offers an intensive five-month training that pairs entrepreneurs with Texas inmates. Prisoners work with mentors on a business idea they can start after they are released, with the goal of earning a decent wage.
Does it work? Less than 10 percent of the roughly 700 graduates from the program have returned to prison, compared with 45 percent of incarcerated men nationwide, according to Mr. Gregg.
Statistics like those have helped the Prison Entrepreneurship Program recruit a stable group of volunteer entrepreneurs and employers willing to hire the ex-offenders. But Mr. Gregg admits that “it can be challenging to raise money for a bunch of convicts.”
I’m interested in talking with other fundraisers who work for organizations with potentially controversial or unpopular causes. Share your story with me by writing to holly.hall@philanthropy.com.
