How to create free job training and educational content for prisoners.

Level is a nonprofit that creates free job training and educational content for prisoners. I want to share with you a short letter from a man named Jesse who is incarcerated here in Texas.

Hello, and thank you for the last books you sent. This time, I am looking for how-to books on trades … welding, small engines. Anything really. I just want to keep learning, so send stuff to help me succeed. Thank you for your time

-Jesse

Every year, 640,000 inmates are released from state and federal prisons in America. That’s equal to the population of a medium sized city like Las Vegas or Baltimore.

Incarcerated individuals like Jesse are generally unprepared for a successful re-integration after release. They experience high unemployment, low income, are frequently re-incercerated and those who aren’t are ten times more likely to experience homelessness.

Some of the most effective tools for increasing the chances of success for inmates after they are released are education and job training. Those are the exact things Jesse was requesting in his letter. And for good reason — inmates who participate in educational programs while in prison have measurably higher incomes, lower unemployment rates and lower recidivism when released.

Right now, the vast majority of education programs for incarcerated individuals are in-person in-prison classes taught by the government and nonprofits. These courses suffer from scalability issues and inmates suffer from lack of access, but I’m not here to bash these classes — they are far better than nothing. What inmates don’t have is direct access to educational content that they can own, use in their cell and work on in their own time, exploring exactly what they want to learn about. Imagine that you had desires to get ahead — like Jesse does — but you had no access to educational resources except maybe a few state sponsored class offered a few hours a week.

But what can we do? Incarcerated individuals like Jesse don’t have internet access, they don’t have money and there’s far too many to reach efficiently with in-person programs. This is where an endless stack of letters, a new idea and 10 pieces of paper come in.

For the past 7 years, I’ve volunteered with one of the country’s largest programs that sends free used books to prisoners. Every year, we open 24,000 request letters from prisoners — including that letter from Jesse and this one from Reginald — and send back over 70,000 free donated books.

A third of the letters we received from incarcerated individuals like Jesse and Reginald contained a request for content that we didn’t have, and those requests consistently fell into three groups — job training resources, basic high school education content and personal development material. I realized that these tens of thousands of unfilled requests represented a real opportunity.

That’s when I co-founded Level, an equal opportunity education nonprofit that creates free, high quality, infinitely reproducible learning guides for inmates. We’re solving three core problems related to prisoner education.

First, we’re addressing the issue of scale. Our guides are scalable and can be printed by anyone on 10 sheets of standard printer paper, folded and sent through the mail, becoming the permanent personal property of each recipient.

Second, we’re working around the issue of limited internet access. It’s true that mass distribution of content to people without internet access is challenging. We have some innovative solutions to these challenges. Each of our guides fit seven thousand words, a half dozen illustrations, five practice pages, a return survey and two learning trackers all onto ten sheets of paper that anyone can print and send through the mail. Who needs internet?

Third, we’re creating content that is optimized for adults who have been failed by traditional schooling. Rather than regurgitating the same content that didn’t work the first time around, we’re using modern research to create content that works for learners who have been overlooked many times before.

To reach incarcerated individuals at scale, we’re partnering with programs like the one I described before that are already sending hundreds of thousands of books every year to prisoners. These programs lack the very thing we create — scalable reproducible educational and job training content — and they have the exact thing we need — a thriving distribution system sending content directly into prisons.

My team is experienced and passionate. I’ve taken a tech startup from inception to sale. My co-founder Kate has decades of experience in education, and we’ve both worked with prisoner education groups.

Our advisors lead successful and innovative adult education, distributed publishing and prison education organizations.

Our goal is to create a library of learning content created specifically for prisoners that they can access on their own terms. Through this work, we can make real impact on their post-release success including income, employment and recidivism rates.

My ask of you is to connect us with donors who are interested in improving adult education, specifically for populations that are hard to reach.

We’re raising $175,000 to fund the next year of development when we’ll create 12 custom job training and education guides and distribute them for free to 30,000 prisoners.

If you know people who are passionate about criminal justice advocacy as well as new approaches to adult education and job training, please put us in touch.

I’m Alex and I’m with Level. Thank you.