Mount Tamalpais College

Announcements

Allison Lopez Will Begin as Learning Specialist this Fall

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A few months ago we launched a search for a Learning Specialist to allow us to create and share best practices in trauma-informed instruction as well as methods for identifying and supporting students with learning disabilities.

Because such a high proportion of our incarcerated students are living with the long-term effects of trauma, student support services that incorporate trauma-informed practices are particularly critical for our work. Our goal is to understand the impact trauma has had on our students’ educational experiences, both in the way they view themselves as learners and their awareness of the resources available to them.

In a survey of incarcerated students enrolled in the College Program, nearly 90% were victims of violence or abuse while growing up, nearly 50% had experienced homelessness, and 36% had struggled with food insecurity. Of the surveyed students, 33% reported that they either had been diagnosed with a learning disability or suspected they had one. These experiences can cause long-term emotional and psychological barriers to learning. Currently our instructors are trained to identify students who are struggling and develop plans to help them finish course materials at their own pace. We created the Learning Specialist position as an extension of our work in an effort to train staff and faculty to maintain physically and emotionally safe learning environments in which student needs are met with a holistic, collaborative, and culturally competent approach. One that empowers and supports our students with learning disabilities and benefits our entire student body.

Allison Lopez brings years of experience to this role, previously serving as the College Preparatory English Program Coordinator. In this new position she will design, implement and manage expanded services for students with learning disabilities, psychological obstacles to learning, and challenges related to a history of trauma. Broadly, she will work to build organizational capacity to improve student support.

This new position is made possible by generous support from the Ascendium Education Group, and is tied to a larger initiative to share these new trauma-informed practices and approaches with practitioners of prison higher education around the country.

Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Aids Programs

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We are thrilled to announce that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will provide funding for the Prison University Project along with Ear Hustle, an award-winning podcast about life inside San Quentin.

You can read more about these partnerships in the San Quentin News — a publication that is produced, written, and published by people who are incarcerated in San Quentin.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) will provide grant funding to the Prison University Project (PUP) and Ear Hustle, an award-winning podcast. Both organizations are based at San Quentin State Prison.

PUP offers more than 350 inmates the opportunity to earn their Associate of Arts degree inside prison. Ear Hustle allows inmates to share their stories about what it’s like to live in prison on a daily basis.

“We are thrilled to support Ear Hustle’s efforts to connect with more listeners, and the Prison University Project’s plan to create new educational opportunities for people in San Quentin,” said Ana Zamora, criminal justice manager at CZI.

“These programs are breaking new ground by helping incarcerated people tell their own stories and make positive change in their own lives and in the world.”

In a statement, CZI said PUP “has been the site of a unique and unprecedented educational enterprise, providing excellent higher education to people at San Quentin,” and it acknowledged how the college program “supports increased access to higher education for incarcerated people across California.”

“The Prison University Project works to transform the U.S. criminal justice system by empowering incarcerated individuals to become leaders and change agents,” said Jody Lewen, executive director of PUP. The college program works “to break down harmful biases that dehumanize the image of incarcerated people in the public imagination.”

“The grant came in at an unbelievable time,” said Nigel Poor, co-host of Ear Hustle. “We didn’t have a big plan when we started. That’s only sustainable up to a point.”

Inmate and Ear Hustle co-host Earlonne Woods said the high-profile grant will show that their work is important. “Ear Hustle has to rely on grants,” he said. “I’m appreciative of CZI in assisting us in our struggles for funding.”

In October 2015, Dr. Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg and husband, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, toured San Quentin to get a first-hand look at the programs inside the prison and to talk to inmates.

Aly Tamboura, who paroled from San Quentin in 2016, received his AA degree from PUP and learned computer coding in the Code.7370 program. He now works for CZI as its technology & program delivery manager and was instrumental in the grant funding going to PUP and Ear Hustle.

Poor, who is a tenured professor at California State University Sacramento, taught History of Photography at PUP in 2012 when she first met Tamboura, who was then an inmate-student. “He was a really good student,” she said. “He was really serious.”

After Tamboura paroled, he remained interested in the criminal justice system. While working for CZI, he proposed the idea of grant funding to organizations doing work to improve the criminal justice system.

Poor said she saw Tamboura at a Human Rights Watch conference, and then at a PUP brainstorming conference. Later, he escorted her into the CZI conference room in Palo Alto, California, to discuss a grant for Ear Hustle.

“It was wild,” Poor said. “It’s so uplifting that someone who was incarcerated is now responsible for funding Ear Hustle. If I hadn’t been teaching at PUP, I would’ve never made the connection.”

“A lot of people get out of prison and say what they’re going to do,” Woods said. He said Tamboura didn’t say he would do anything. “But he did. I’m just appreciative of a guy who looked back.”

“CZI’s generosity will allow us to grow in beautiful ways,” Woods said. “We usually hear about the great criminal justice reform work that groups like CZI do and only dream that this sequestered population could directly benefit … well, that dream has become a reality.”

Poor said she believes CZI wants to give voice to people who are voiceless. Through Ear Hustle, stories told by those living in prison are produced inside San Quentin and broadcast to the world with more than 12 million downloads.

In 2016, Ear Hustle won Radiotopia’s Podquest when it was chosen from more than 1,500 contestants from around the world, and it has been in the number one spot on Apple Podcasts.

The Prison University Project delivers the opportunity to the incarcerated to benefit from education in the liberal arts and to use their learning, talents and life experiences to make important academic and collective contributions. It provides training and mentorship to emerging educational programs that provide higher education in California and nationally.

In recognition of its impact and for providing education opportunities to the incarcerated, PUP was awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

At its 2018 graduation, Lewen said, “There are people out there that care about the things we care about.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is a philanthropic organization that is working to build a future for everyone. It uses traditional grant making, advocacy, storytelling, impact investing and engineering to help drive change at scale. Its criminal justice reform program focuses on power building in communities traditionally excluded from policy making and agenda-setting in criminal justice.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in the San Quentin News on July 30, 2018.
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Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Prison University Project Welcomes Three New Staff Members

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This spring, the Prison University Project welcomed three new staff members:

Jeanie Kirk, Grants Officer

Before joining the Prison University Project, Jeanie was a Senior Grant Writer with Julep Consulting, where she managed foundation fundraising applications for The Data Center, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Foundation for Louisiana, the Vera Institute of Justice’s New Orleans Office, and Common Edge Collaborative, in addition to supporting the fundraising capacity of the Mississippi River Delta Restoration Campaign, and GNO, Inc. Her consulting work in New Orleans began with a focus on coastal resilience and restoration funding campaigns, but through building stalwart relationships with intersectional organizations, her work expanded to include writing in support of justice reform, racial reconciliation, data literacy, and social justice. She began her career in philanthropy in San Francisco with The Nature Conservancy’s California Chapter, where she served for four years as the Program Manager for the chapter’s Corporate and Foundation Relations team, a $30 million/year fundraising unit. Jeanie has an MA from Columbia University focused on climate change and sustainable development, and a BA in International Studies from the University of Richmond. She has traveled extensively and lived in Europe, India, and Latin America and is based in Portland, Oregon.

Derrius Jones, On-Site Program Coordinator

Derrius is a recent graduate of The College of Wooster in Ohio with a major in Africana Studies and a minor in Sociology. While in undergrad, he served as a student representative during administrative meetings to discuss improving student experience and sat on the board of the Diversity, Equity, and Strategic planning committee. He devoted his research to developing effective reentry methods and improving development for low income urban communities.

Jared Rothenberg, Development and Communications Associate

Before joining the Prison University Project, Jared worked as an educator for The Mosaic Project in Oakland, CA. Prior to that, he taught at a bilingual public school in Madrid, Spain and founded a nonprofit focused on environmental justice education in Providence, RI. Committed to radically inclusive, student-centered learning, he brings a passion for teaching, program coordination, and nonprofit development to this role. Jared earned a BA in History and Environmental Studies from Brown University.

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Call for Paper Proposals—Academic Conference at San Quentin

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On October 5, the Prison University Project will host an academic conference at San Quentin State Prison in which incarcerated students and outside scholars will exchange ideas about “Corrections, Rehabilitation, and Reform.” This will be one of the few academic conferences ever held inside a prison in the U.S., and we are eager to broker a dialogue in which academic scholarship and those within the sphere of the criminal justice system support and improve one another.

In an era in which “rehabilitation” is increasingly rewarded but nevertheless difficult to quantify, in which prison populations increase at the same time as abolitionist movements intensify, and in which racial and economic injustice are prime contributors to prison overpopulation, it is urgent to generate new ideas. While many scholars outside of prison focus on just these questions, we posit that the answers are inadequate until incarcerated scholars are able to weigh in on the debates that shape their own lives and futures. This conference seeks solutions for the ills of the criminal justice system in the U.S. that came about in the 20th century. We believe that if incarcerated Americans come together with scholars from the outside, we might generate valuable debates and ideas about the direction that 21st century reform might take.

The Prison University Project has been running a college for people incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison since 1996. We run twenty classes each semester and have over 700 active students. The mission of the Prison University Project is to provide excellent higher education to people at San Quentin; to support increased access to higher education for incarcerated people; and to stimulate public awareness about higher education access and criminal justice.

Panels will range from the practical, to the theoretical, to the programmatic; possible topics may include, but certainly will not be limited to, the following:

Practical
-Social isolation and education
-The school-to-prison pipeline
-Educational goals and incarcerated students
-Social and cultural relevance in curricula and faculty training
-The place of technology in incarcerated spaces

Theoretical
-Socio-biology and criminal behavior
-Cognitive biases in the criminal justice system
-Communitarian, civil-society oriented approaches to incarceration
-The impact of prison higher education on individual and social behavior
-The impact of academic culture on social behavior and expectations

Programmatic
-The meaning of resilience
-Uses of technology in prison education
-The role of technology in alternatives to incarceration

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Statewide Training on Higher Education in Prisons, March 18 – 20 2018

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The Prison University Project is pleased to host this statewide education and training conference for practitioners of in-prison higher education, as well as others who are interested in learning more about the field, March 18 – 20 at the Four Points by Sheraton Hotel in San Rafael.

Important links for attendees are below.

REGISTER FOR THE CONFERENCE.

BOOK YOUR HOTEL ACCOMMODATIONS.

FULL CONFERENCE AGENDA: Training Conference March 2018 Agenda

SITE VISIT SCHEDULE: Site Visit Schedule March 18 & 20

SAN QUENTIN RULES FOR VISITORS: SQ Rules for Visitors, 2018

 

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.