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Petey Greene Program Builds Supportive Relationships Between Students and Incarcerated Individuals

“[Tutoring] empowers…those who are incarcerated. This isn’t about you; it’s about them. They have the capacity to succeed, and it’s about how you can aid them in this process” - Petey Greene Program volunteer Lucy Blevins.


It is exactly this concept of empowerment and success that the Petey Greene Program aims to promote in all of the people they support— people who have been previously incarcerated or currently are — through its volunteer program. The Petey Greene Program, founded in 2008, specifically focuses on supporting the academic goals of people who currently are or previously have been incarcerated through a web of volunteer tutoring. Volunteers work one-on-one with the program’s “students” to help them acquire their GED or other high school credentials that will prepare them for further education. This focus on high school credentials is crucial for the Petey Greene Program as it recognizes that only 20% of people who were formerly incarcerated have a high school diploma— addressing this works as an intervention to the school-to-prison pipeline that focuses on empowerment and education.


Partnering with carceral facilities and reentry programs, this program is able to be flexible for both the students and tutors to ensure that everyone’s needs are met; such an environment that is flexible and also student-centered emphasizes the supportive nature of human interaction for those who are incarcerated. Fostering these kinds of relationships not only helps students succeed academically but also bolsters their belief in themselves. The school-to-prison pipeline often destroys the self-confidence of people who have been incarcerated, and the Petey Greene Program facilitates training, workshops, and events to educate tutors on how to help students rebuild their confidence and their academic capacities. Moreover, the Petey Greene Program uses these workshops and trainings to help tutors get involved with the broader incarcerated community and activist community to connect them with the push for systemic change surrounding incarceration.


While the Petey Greene Program targets educational access and improving it for people who are previously or currently incarcerated, this organization recognizes that it is “but one element of reform required to promote a more just society” but nonetheless essential. Assisting students in getting their GED improves overall education levels while opening up a new range of jobs once the students leave prison; getting a job with a criminal record can be tricky, and this organization hopes that the students’ work with tutors can remove the educational barriers that exist. More specifically, the Petey Greene Program states that “...everyone deserves a chance, that we cannot discount anyone, and that we are responsible for each other. That is why we work to ensure that all formerly and currently incarcerated people have access to high-quality education.”


To achieve this goal, the Petey Greene Program offers four different programs: the College Bridge, the HBCU Forward Initiative, the Justice Education Series, and regional volunteer programs. The mission of the College Bridge program is to prepare students for college, so instead of focusing on GED work, this program offers college readiness programming for skills such as writing, critical thinking, and math. Launched in 2021, HBCU Forward Initiative began with a model program at Howard University that prepares Black volunteers to tutor in carceral settings. This initiative supports tutors in processing their experience and the trauma they may experience while working inside a setting such as prison, and it assists them in understanding their experiences with a system-impacted framework to encourage students to develop justice-basic programming and events on their campuses. The Justices Education Series aims for a similar goal of justice education as it is designed to raise the awareness of volunteers and the public awareness of the policies and practices that have led to mass incarceration and inherently disrupt the educational experiences of the students the Petey Greene Program supports. While the organization focuses on educational reform in carceral settings, this series steps back and looks at the systemic changes necessary in prisons; it prioritizes the voices and expertise of system-impacted people with about 72% of the presenters in this series having been impacted by incarceration and the prison system before.


The last program this organization offers is the regional volunteer network, which has a branch here in D.C. that college students can get involved with. Since 2015, this program recruits, trains, and coordinates undergraduate and graduate student volunteers to serve as academic tutors for people who are or have been incarcerated in Maryland, D.C., or Virginia. They also train interested community member volunteers as well. In the past, the program has worked with George Washington University and Howard University in D.C., and they are always looking for more volunteers to support students enrolled in high school equivalency programs. A majority of the subjects that are covered in tutoring include math, reading, writing, social studies, and science. The Petey Greene Program also highly encourages bilingual tutors to apply. This opportunity allows college students to get involved with addressing systemic issues head-on and supporting people who have been incarcerated, and volunteers work in settings from detention centers to correctional facilities.


To get involved with this volunteer program or to ask any questions, contact the D.C. Regional Manager Norma Dhanaraj at ndhanaraj@peteygreene.org or apply through the link here.

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