May 2022 Newsletter
Leadership Transition at the Petey Greene Program
With sadness and tremendous gratitude, the Board of Trustees announces that Alison Badgett is resigning her position as executive director of the Petey Greene Program (PGP), effective June 3, 2022.
Under Alison’s leadership, the PGP has grown and thrived, despite the challenges to in-person tutoring operations posed by the pandemic. Alison led the development of a three-year strategic plan, diversified the PGP’s revenue stream by developing an organizational approach to fee-for-service contracts, led staff in developing new partnerships in each of the PGP regions, and expanded the PGP’s work into reentry programming and youth-serving programs. At a time of great challenge for nonprofit organizations, Alison orchestrated a period of growth and expansion for the PGP and earned the support and admiration of its staff. We are truly grateful for her leadership and wish her the very best in her next endeavor.
The Board will launch a search for the PGP's next executive director in the coming weeks. Until the next executive director is selected, Emma Sindelar, the PGP’s current Director of Program Operations, will serve as the interim executive director. Emma has served in a number of roles at the PGP, and she brings a deep understanding of the work and considerable leadership expertise to the role.
We are deeply grateful to Alison for her inspiring leadership of the PGP since 2019. She leaves an organization that is poised to grow both in programming and in influence, and her accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the pandemic that erupted just a few months into her tenure.
If you have any questions about the transition or the search for the PGP’s next executive director, please do not hesitate to reach out to me: yusuf.s.dahl@gmail.com.
Yusuf Dahl, Chair, The Petey Greene Program Board of Trustees
Alison Badgett’s reflection on her time at the PGP
To the Petey Greene Program Community:
I am writing to share with you my transition from the Petey Greene Program this June, after serving as executive director since 2019. Together, we have reimagined the Petey Greene Program, deepening the impact of the organization, now well into its second decade.
Through innovative initiatives for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students, like college readiness programs, hybrid learning, and reentry tutoring, and over a dozen new partnerships with community-based organizations, the Petey Greene Program has adapted and thrived despite the pandemic. We’ve added staff expertise in curriculum, training, evaluation, and communications, and the expertise of lived experience with the criminal legal system. Progress has been equally bold on the volunteer side, with the PGP’s launch of the HBCU Forward initiative to elevate and support Black volunteer tutors.
As one of the only organizations focused on prison education at the pre-collegiate level, with innovative program models and new, diversified funding streams, the PGP is poised for a new phase of growth, with the reputation to attract bold new leadership. In the meantime, the PGP will be led by an extraordinarily capable interim executive director, Emma Sindelar, who has worked with the Petey Greene Program in various roles since 2016, most recently as director of program operations.
Thank you all for the opportunity to lead this important organization through a critical inflection point. I look forward to supporting the Petey Greene Program well into the future!
Sincerely,
Alison Badgett
Jesus Cerda has always been an artist. As a child in the Dominican Republic, he made his own tracing paper by pouring cooking oil over regular paper and waiting for the oil to dry and turn the paper transparent. He cites Japanese anime and classic cartoons from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s as his aesthetic inspirations, and he’s proud to have created what may be the first animated book bag with legs. At 26, Jesus is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Studio Art at Hunter College, but his path to college was bumpy.
“Even though I applied for college and financial aid after high school, I wasn’t aware of how to do the process,” Jesus explains. “After graduating from Manhattan Bridges High School in 2012, I worked as a cashier in a supermarket for almost three years. Then, I moved to Florida and did temporary jobs.” After he returned to New York, Jesus had nowhere to live, and a stay in a shelter resulted in an interaction that led to his involvement with the criminal legal system. Jesus was spared incarceration, and his probation officer introduced him to the Youth Justice Network (YJN), which supports and advocates for young people in New York whose lives have intersected with the city’s jail system. The Petey Greene Program partners with YJN to provide tutoring and other academic supports to students like Jesus.
At YJN, Jesus found a family and encouragement to go back to school. He was a member of the Arches program—a transformative group mentoring project for young people on probation. In almost-daily visits to the YJN office, Jesus connected with mentors, worked on his drawings, and hung out in a welcoming environment where food and support were readily available. Each young adult at YJN is paired with an advocate, and Jesus’ advocate, Jasmin Luciano-King, urged him to go back to school. Jesus enrolled at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) in the fall of 2019.
Once there, YJN helped him connect to Project Impact, a program designed to meet the needs of BMCC students who have been impacted by the justice system. Project Impact staff helped him negotiate the transition to college and found him a work- study assignment so he would have a source of funds. After the pandemic hit, they helped him get a hotspot so he could continue with his classes remotely. Most importantly, they were a constant source of advice and encouragement for him.
Jesus generally did well at BMCC until he took a physics class that was required for graduation. “The first time I took physics, it moved too fast and I had to drop out and pay $500. Luckily, YJN paid that fee. So the next time I enrolled, I asked for help right away.” Jesus was paired with a Petey Greene Program tutor, Michelle Bosché, a graduate student at Columbia University, and they met weekly to go over class material and work on homework. “Working with Michelle made me feel more confident. I kept my grades up, and I finished the course with an A-.” Passing the physics course cleared the way for Jesus to get his associate’s degree and apply to a four year program.
A second PGP volunteer, community member Andrew Kachel, who works as Director of the Andrea Rosen Gallery, helped Jesus navigate the application process, which is especially complex for the art and design programs that Jesus was applying for. Andrew helped Jesus identify the requirements for each of the five programs Jesus applied for, complete the application and put together portfolios for programs that required them. “I got into all the programs: School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute of Technology, City Tech, Queens College, and Hunter College; but I went to Hunter because it’s free,” Jesus explains.
“Jesus has faced many challenges over the past three years—challenges that would have defeated many other people. But he has been incredibly dedicated, resilient, and hard working,” says John Gordon, Deputy Executive Director at YJN, who has known Jesus since 2019. “I don’t think I have ever worked with a student who has been as committed to his studies as Jesus.”
This semester, Jesus is working with PGP tutor Aaron Stagoff-Belfort, Program Associate and Coordinator with The Vera Institute of Justice, who is supporting him with the writing assignments for a religion and social justice course. “The PGP tutors and YJN staff have been there for me every step of the way,” Jesus says. “They encouraged me to go back to school and were there to provide help when I needed it.”
As a child in the Dominican Republic, Jesus Cerda loved to draw waterfalls with a set of watercolors that his mother got for him. When he moved to the U.S. to live with his father at age 14, he lost touch with his love of drawing for some time. Picking up his pencil again as a young adult, Jesus knew he wanted to create comics, but he didn’t know how to transform his talent and interest into a professional path. Through YJN, Project Impact, and the PGP, Jesus found the network of support and encouragement that every young person needs in order to grow and thrive.
Explore Jesus’ portfolio.
By Maco L. Faniel, Director of Equity, Inclusion and Justice
Access to high-quality educational programming and educational support for currently and formerly incarcerated learners are matters of justice. It can hardly be otherwise, because, as we have learned from the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated learners we serve, educational programming is one of the only services focused on their freedom dreams.
Education and Black Freedom Dreaming
The term freedom dreams was coined by historian Robin D. G. Kelly, who argued in his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination that “the desires, hopes, and intentions of the people who fought for change cannot be easily categorized, contained or explained.” Therefore, instead of relying on a singular, acceptable, and preferred explanation for how Black people have imagined and pursued freedoms, he offers freedom dreams. This framework posits that since the moment of capture Black people have always fought against unfreedoms produced by racism, patriarchy, and capitalism, by imagining and pursuing a different world, a world closer to freedom.
Of the various ways that Black people have imagined and pursued freedom, education has been a consistent tactic and aim. In the years that followed gradual emancipation in the urban north, formerly enslaved Black people established independent schools, to improve their employment opportunities and to create opportunities for their children. Even before emancipation and the establishment of schools, many Black people were self-taught, secretly learning how to read and write, mastering the language and scientific knowledge of the learned white elite. They pursued education as a political act, using literacy and numeracy skills as tools for resistance and liberation. From their learning came beautiful poetry, almanacs, manifestos questioning slavery and freedom, and new religious traditions.
During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black people actively pursued education to ensure their freedom and expand their independence. Many primary and secondary schools, and HBCUs were established with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau, domestic missionary organizations, funders, and others sympathetic to Black freedom dreams. When Black men became eligible to vote in 1870, they were also able to hold public office, which gave them the opportunity to set policy in southern states. With this legislative power, they enacted free public education and established land grant colleges in the south. For most of the 20th century, Black people fought for equal and equitable education. Some wins of these efforts include the desegregation of public schools with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the desegregation of higher education, and the establishment of Black Studies programs. Since these wins, educational opportunity, equity, and justice became victims of defunding, deprioritization, and erasure; however, Black people continue to fight for educational access and high-quality educational programming in their freedom dreaming.
Educational Justice
Of course, we know that not all incarcerated people are Black. But we also know that Black people are disproportionately targeted by the carceral state and are too often denied access to the educational programming that helps us reach our freedom dreams. We also know that Black freedom dreaming has long inspired other people's freedom dreaming in the face of personal and group-differentiated injustice. In fact, the prison movements of the 1970s , which campaigned for better conditions of confinement, were inspired by Black people's desires for equal treatment under the law, political power, economic citizenship, self-determination, community control, and educational opportunity.
In the present moment, defined by activism calling for the abolition of systems that delegitimize Black lives, incarcerated people have been joined by allies to agitate for nutritious food, access to quality healthcare, less overcrowding, protection against physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, the end of solitary confinement, workforce and reentry programming, the end of predatory communication technologies, and access to high-quality educational programming. Incarcerated folks want conditions of confinement that don’t duplicate harm and that support their ability to live sustainable lives post-incarceration. As allies, we join them in pushing for humane conditions of confinement and imagining a world that does not produce social death.
Incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people tell us that educational access and high-quality educational programming are essential to humane confinement and the ability to live sustainably post-incarceration. Too often, though, conversations about the necessity and benefits of educational programming focus on decreasing violence on the inside, reducing recidivism, and increasing employment opportunities. These are important, but we have learned that the desires of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated learners are more expansive. Access to high-quality education for some is about employment, for some, it's about legal advocacy, and for others, it might be about being able to help their children with math homework. For many, it’s also about the awakenings that come from asking questions and the sheer joy of intellectual pursuits.
Getting Closer to Freedom
At the Petey Greene Program, we support incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people in their freedom dreams through education. We also support our volunteers by educating them about the systems that produce the educational circumstances of the students they tutor. Many of our volunteers join the PGP because they are inspired by the most recent movement for Black freedom. They want to join efforts to ensure that the lives of Black people and other marginalized folks matter.
As tutors, PGP volunteers focus on supporting the educational dreams of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated learners. However, many of them emerge from their tutoring experience and from the PGP’s justice-oriented leadership programming as advocates, committed to changing the systems that produce confinement in the first place, and to combatting the lasting impacts that make it difficult for people to live sustainable lives post-incarceration.
One Howard University volunteer, a participant in our HBCU Forward Initiative at Howard University, explains how tutoring has expanded her vision of how to help incarcerated and formerly incarcerated folks:
"If you were to ask me about what I want to do to help those that are system-impacted, when I was in middle school and high school, I probably would’ve told you I wanted to be a warden because that was the only way I knew. I was going to be the best warden. I was going to bring the best programs into these facilities. I was going to take care of those within the facility. And that’s all I knew. But as [I tutored] I have taught myself about…the unjust factors that harm our communities. I have grown a lot, and so I went from wanting to be a warden…to fighting for abolition within a span of my undergraduate career."
This is partially why we expanded our mission statement in 2020. We not only support the freedom dreams of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated learners, but we also help our volunteers expand their own freedom dreams and join the students that they support in reimagining educational justice.
At the PGP, we imagine a world where formerly incarcerated people lead us in getting closer to freedom. We imagine a world where everybody has what they need to thrive and where we no longer have punitive systems and practices that exclude, deny, and confine. Providing high-quality tutoring for currently and formerly incarcerated people, and helping our volunteers become advocates for educational justice, are two ways that we approach the shared task of creating that world.
2021 was a year of growth and forward momentum at the Petey Greene Program, and we’re delighted to share our 2021 Annual Report with you. Thank you for all of your support.