Mount Tamalpais College

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Mount Tamalpais College wins the Heart of Marin Award

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We’re thrilled to announce that Mount Tamalpais College has received the Heart of Marin Award for Achievement in Nonprofit Excellence. This annual award is presented by the Center for Volunteer & Nonprofit Leadership (CVNL) to an organization that demonstrates exemplary service to its constituents. We were honored to attend the 30th annual awards ceremony on January 12, 2023, alongside other leaders providing civic leadership in Marin. 

“This was the first time we’ve been back in person for Heart of Marin since the pandemic began,” said Linda Jacobs, CEO at CVNL. “The buzz in the room was palatable. It is clear we have all been eager to come back together again and celebrate the good happening in our Marin communities.”Awards were distributed in eight categories that recognized select volunteers, nonprofits, and organizations working in Marin. We were humbled to be in the company of such dedicated, compassionate, determined individuals, including Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Rev. Dr. Jane Adams Spahr, who has tirelessly worked on justice issues in the LGBTQ+ community, and five inspirational young people whose service was recognized by the Youth Volunteer of the Year Award. The event and honorees were recently highlighted in the Marin Independent Journal.  

Heart of Marin awards honor those who make it better

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For three decades, the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership has brought together leaders of Marin’s strong community of nonprofit agencies and their volunteers for an annual Heart of Marin luncheon that is an inspiration.

It their It reflects a Marin that gets lost in its affluent facade, a collection of community-spirited leaders and volunteers who are driven by their heartfelt desire to make a difference. It showcases the many among us with big hearts intent on helping others, from fellow students to injured economic injured animals and from men behind bars at San Quentin to those struggling with prejudices toward their gender identities or economic and racial inequities.

Sponsors Marin Sponsors including Bank of Marin, PG&E, Harbor Point Charitable Foundation, BioMarin, Potrero Group, Redwood Credit Union, the Marin Community or Community Foundation, Comerica Bank, Kaiser Permanente San Rafael-Petaluma and the IJ helped make the luncheon possible or underwrote cash awards.

Winners included:

• Tiana Wimmer, for leadership as a board member of Enriching Lives Through Music, the San Rafael-based nonprofit providing youths access to immersive music education.

 • The Rev. Jane Adams Spahr, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, for tireless work in AIDS response and as a longtime beacon for the LGBTQ+ community.

• Marin Agricultural Land Trust for work to help drought-impacted ranches install needed water-saving and conservation improvements.

• Mount Tamalpais College, a San Quentin-based college providing inmates access to associate of arts degrees and college preparatory programs. programs.

• Marin Independent Journal, in part for its support of Marin’s minority-owned businesses through the We Are One Marin program, and the nonprofit sector through the Giving Marin Community Partnership.

• John Beltran, a Marine Mammal Center volunteer who has not only helped with the center’s response and release efforts but donated his high-high-tech talents for a digital map of California’s coastline needed by rescuers.

• Andy Naja-Riese, head of the Agricultural Institute of Marin, commonly known as AIM, for the agency’s success in expanding diversity, equity and inclusion in its programs.

A highlight of each year’s events is recognition of the volunteer work of Marin youth. The long list of nominees was impressive in itself.

Kids can make a difference.

The five recipients of the Youth Volunteer of the Year Awards included:

• Alysha Lee of Novato High School, who has volunteered with the county’s Student Elections Ambassador Program. She helped design the Stop Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Hate curriculum for middle schoolers that’s now being used in 8,900 schools across the nation.

• Talia Harter, a San Rafael High School student, who has volunteered for numerous school and campus efforts, from the Marin Suicide Prevention Collaborative to Youth Transforming Justice.

• Matteo Diaz helped organize and produce the Spahr Center’s Queer Prom, a social event for LGBTQ+ teens and allies. He also has helped create models for school districts to help make their campuses safe and inclusive.

• Sophia White of Marin Catholic High School who has volunteered at the Schurig Center for Brain Injury Recovery in Larkspur since her good Marin good friend suffered a brain injury after a concussion in a soccer game. Her volunteer efforts have also included the San Francisco-Marin Food on Food Bank, Junior Giants, Rec Inc., St. Anselm Church and she has assisted in research programs at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Aging.

• Oliver Goldman, a reliable volunteer, and leader of the Marin County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue, having participated in dozens of search and rescue events and training, as well as achieving numerous first aid, CPR, and public safety certifications.  The event, led for the 21st time by dynamic CVNL CEO Linda Jacobs, is an inspirational reminder of the time and talent our neighbors are donating to make a difference in our community.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Marin Independent Journal in January 2023 written by Marin IJ Editorial Board. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada/Mount Tamalpais College

Mount Tamalpais College Achieves Accreditation

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Mount Tamalpais College is proud to announce that on January 27, 2022, we were granted Initial Accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC). This is a historic moment for Mount Tamalpais College, and a landmark event in a society that has persistently excluded the incarcerated from educational opportunity. San Quentin State Prison is now the site of an academic institution unlike any other in the US: an independent liberal arts college specifically dedicated to serving incarcerated students. 

We could not have achieved this without our community of supporters, faculty, alumni, staff, and friends, whose belief in our mission made this possible. MTC staff, faculty, and students played an especially critical role in hosting the first ACCJC site visit, as well as in developing new program learning outcomes and systems for assessment. Their hard work and dedication over the last two decades are the foundation and inspiration for our current achievements. 

Having reached this milestone, we now continue the essential work of building a world class higher education institution at San Quentin, while helping the field of higher education in prisons across the United States to flourish. This year we will continue to improve the quality of academic instruction, expand student support services, increase access to technology and library resources, and expand our work in the realm of research and evaluation, to name just a few exciting initiatives. 

We extend deep thanks to many people and institutions for their hard work and support throughout the accreditation process: Past Presidents of ACCJC Richard Winn and Stephanie Droker; Interim President Cindy Miles; ACCJC Vice President Catherine Webb; Accreditation Process Director, Elizabeth Dutton. Our ACCJC Peer Review Team, led by Dr. Keith Curry, President of Compton College provided invaluable feedback and guidance that has already profoundly strengthened us as an institution. San Quentin Warden Ron Broomfield, as well as former California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Secretary Ralph Diaz, have also supported this bold initiative from its inception.

You can read more about our accreditation journey and find the press release announcing our official accreditation here.

First Person: Why College Matters for People Serving Extreme Sentences

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I attended a college surrounded by fences “adorned” with barbed wire. In early 2021, at 50 years old, I earned an associate’s degree from Mount Tamalpais College, which is located on the lower yard of San Quentin State Prison. It’s been life changing.

Mount Tamalpais College, which we call Mt. Tam, provides a classroom education on the prison grounds. The teachers are volunteers from other schools including Stanford, San Francisco State University, Harvard, and Berkeley. It has a study hall area where tutors are available five nights a week and a recently opened computer lab with 36 laptops that allow communication with teachers and access to reference materials through a “mediated internet,” according to Kirsten Pickering, research program fellow. 

For incarcerated people, the quality or success of a college program is often measured by recidivism rates. By that standard, Mount Tamalpais, formerly the Prison University Project, is a success. Its students had a recidivism rate of 17 percent compared to the 65 percent recidivism rate for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation as a whole, according to a 2011 program evaluation. 

Moreover, MTC provides jobs for graduates on parole. I’ve seen Dimitri, a former student, come back into the prison, dressed up in a sharp black suit, as an employee of Mt. Tam. The college recently hired Richard “Bonaru” Richardson, the former editor in chief of San Quentin News. I know of at least three other former incarcerated students that are now Mt. Tam employees. 

For those of us serving long sentences, recidivism rates and jobs can’t measure the success of our college education. My pursuit of a degree started in 2016, approximately 16 years into a 55-years-to-life sentence. I would have to live to be 85 years old to evaluate whether an associate’s degree will break the cycle of incarceration that’s circled my adulthood. Proof of the quality of a Mount Tamalpais education has shown itself in several other ways that impacts society and my life.

Incarcerated graduates have a positive influence on their peers and families. I remember attending a graduation where the valedictorian was a man with locks. His siblings attended the event, two sisters and a brother, plus his mother, sat in the front row as he gave a short speech. Afterwards, one of his sisters said, “I’m so proud of my brother. He’s the first to graduate from college in our family. And if he can do that from prison, I can get my degree too.”

The influence of college on peers is also apparent on the yard. In other prisons, the conversations you usually hear about are sports, war stories, or women. At San Quentin, you can walk by and ear hustle (overhear) debates about ethics, politics, or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. 

A 2016 qualitative study featuring interviews with 27 Mt. Tam students showed that the program positively transformed how students think about themselves, others, and their futures. Over 90 percent of respondents reported that college positively affected their self-identity, mental health, and personal relationships. More than two-thirds also said that the program has positively influenced the prison culture at San Quentin, particularly in regards to race relations.

Personally, I see education as the key to my success from behind bars. After getting sentenced to a term beyond my life expectancy I needed a path to redemption in the eyes of my mother, my sons, and society that didn’t involve going home. I came up with becoming a writer because my voice was the one part of me that was still free.

I envisioned writing a memoir that people who grew up in tough neighborhoods like I did would read and drop their guns. The problem with that plan was that I only had a high school education and no creative writing skills. In isolation I wrote for 10 years without training or a mentor. Words stacked up that no one heard.

 In 2013, my security level dropped and I was transferred to San Quentin, a progressive lower security prison. Here they have all kinds of programs and I signed up for anything that could make me a better writer, including college, creative writing and the San Quentin News Journalism Guild.

Each program made my writing better and better. I became the sports editor for San Quentin news, and a contributing writer for The Marshall Project and Current. Additionally, the college program offered a communication class that developed my speaking skills. I pursued the oral art to deliver prerecorded speeches over a collect call to reach Stanford, MoMA and to honor James King, the campaign manager for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and California State Senator Nancy Skinner for their work by the nonprofit law firm UnCommon Law. Plus, speaking skills landed me the cohost and co-producer job with the Ear Hustle podcast, which was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist and DuPont award winner. 

In a trailer used for a classroom, I learned the history of Black codes, unions, the New Deal and other events that shaped the environment that shaped me. From gaining this worldview, I began to look beyond the people who bullied me growing up and instead began to see the systems that pitted us against each other. My new perspective made it easier to quit taking things personally, forgive others, let go of my anger, and heal.

Additionally, I learned how political systems work and put that knowledge to use. I inspired Taina Angeli Vargas of the nonprofit advocacy group Initiate Justice to fight for the restoration of voting rights for incarcerated people. Our efforts led to Prop 17, an initiative on a 2020 ballot in California which gained the support to restore voting rights to people on parole.

Another thing that made learning from teachers in person a high-quality educational experience was the socialization. Other prisons only offered correspondence courses that pale in comparison to in person learning. Imagine professors from famous universities volunteering to give you a free education. Their dedication made me feel a love and loyalty to society that I never felt before — I can’t be a waste of their time.

I think the biggest mark of success stemming from my college education on a prison yard is the opportunity to go home. On January 13, 2022 California Governor Gavin Newsom commuted my sentence, which grants me a parole board hearing this summer for a chance of getting a release date in early 2023. As a reason for granting mercy, Newsom’s Legal Affairs Office cited “participating in self-help programming and completing college coursework.”

Editor’s Note: Mount Tamalpais College was founded in 1996 as the Prison University Project, and operated as an extension site of Patten University. In January 2020, the program changed its name to Mount Tamalpais College when it became a candidate for accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC). The college is the first independent liberal arts institution dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students.

Rahsaan “New York” Thomas is a writer, podcaster, and director. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the DuPont Award in 2020 for his work as a co-host and co-producer on Season Four of the Ear Hustle podcast. He’s also the chairperson of the San Quentin satellite chapter of the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists and a contributing writer for Current, the Marshall Project, and San Quentin News. All from a cell at San Quentin State Prison.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Open Campus on January 19, 2022.

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Seeking faculty for Spring 2022

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We’re preparing for our spring semester, which begins in January — and we need you!

There are a variety of roles in which educators can volunteer with Mount Tamalpais College. From instructors to TAs, tutors to research assistants, it takes an incredible community to provide a world-class education to our students.

We seek candidates who are committed to our mission and to working with diverse communities. All faculty are required to have some teaching or tutoring experience, and credit course faculty also must have a graduate degree—ideally a PhD—in a relevant discipline. People who have been directly impacted by incarceration, or who reflect the cultural, ethnic, socio-economic, and racial diversity of our student body are especially encouraged to apply.

You can learn more about the various roles and teaching opportunities here, and submit your application at the links below. We will start reviewing applications on November 8, 2021. While we will still accept applications past the deadline, applications received by the deadline will be prioritized.