New Initiative to Turn the Formerly Incarcerated into Entrepreneurs

As policymakers and economic developers grow to recognize the need to create broader opportunities for prosperity to sustain future national competitiveness, four facts reveal one of the complex and compounding factors hampering productive participation from a significant segment of our population:  

• No country incarcerates more of its population than the United States does – despite U.S. crime rates being at historic lows.  source
• With nearly 2.3 million people incarcerated presently, the United States houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners, while representing less than 4.5 percent of global population.  source
• An estimated 60 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals remain unemployed one year after their release, raising the risk of recidivism and resulting in lost lifetime earnings. source
• Nearly half of U.S. children today now have at least one parent with a criminal record. source

What might be the prospects of those children climbing the ladder to become future tech entrepreneurs for your community – or even simply active participants in an innovation-based economy – if so many of the bottom rungs are broken?  

Stable, meaningful employment for their parents, including the formerly incarcerated, seems critical.  A new partnership of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and Justine PETERSEN, is attempting to address the former-prisoner/now-parent employment issue through entrepreneurship education and microloans.

Announced this week in Detroit, Aspire Entrepreneurship Initiative will have additional, initial rollouts in Chicago, Louisville, and St. Louis.   The SBA will oversee strategic planning for the pilot initiative, work with its microlending partners to make capital available for program participants, and leverage its policy research expertise to craft a comprehensive evaluation design for assessing the pilot’s effectiveness.

Justine PETERSEN, is a nearly 20-year-old, St. Louis-based initiative to connect institutional resources with the needs of low-to-moderate income families and individuals in order to build assets and create enduring change.  For the Aspire Entrepreneurship Initiative, Justine PETERSEN will deliver the intensive, cohort-based entrepreneurial education program and the Kellogg Foundation will fund the pilot initiative and provide matching revolving loan funds and evaluation support. 

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation will partner with the SBA to produce a white paper summarizing the insights and outcomes produced by the pilot initiative.