Catalyze: Unlocked Futures
Our cohort-based approach to accelerating the growth of organizations led by justice-impacted social entrepreneurs.
Removing barriers to opportunity for justice-impacted individuals and communities.
Systemic barriers—including lack of access to formal job training, limited housing options, and hiring restrictions due to criminal records—leave 60 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals unemployed one year after their release, contributing to the recidivism cycle that damages so many communities. Entrepreneurship is one of the most viable economic pathways for the formerly incarcerated to escape this cycle, live with dignity, and self-determination, and contribute to their communities.
Unlocked Futures is a cohort-based approach that aims to remove barriers to entrepreneurship for people whose experience with the American legal system provides them with unmatched expertise and insight into how to improve and build alternatives to the current incarceration system.
Our goal is to increase visibility and access to capital for justice-impacted individuals and communities and support organizations aimed at changing the American legal system.
“ We have so much creativity inside ourselves but we are often diminished due to our past transgressions…We must change the way we think from crime and punishment to transforming harm to healing and giving back! Stacey Borden of New Beginnings Reentry Services, an Unlocked Futures alumni organization
We support organizations that remove barriers to opportunity through:
- Housing and re-entry support
- Access to employment
- Job training and upskilling
- Advocacy and policy training
- Justice reform and access to legal support
- Ending the school-to-prison pipeline
Justice-impacted individuals include those who have been incarcerated or detained in a prison, an immigration detention center, local jail, juvenile detention center, or any other carceral setting, those who have been convicted but not incarcerated, those who have been charged but not convicted, and those who have been arrested (LSAC).
