Breaking Bread, Building Bonds: Community Building and Meaning Making as Essential Components for Volunteer Engagement and Student Success
Building Community of Volunteers
On an icy January morning on Pittsburgh's East Side we gathered: twenty volunteers, Petey Greene Program (PGP) staff from across regions, and a panel of advocates, some formerly incarcerated, some invested for the sake of it. Our goal was manifold: to introduce the volunteers to the program we were launching, to disabuse them of any misconceptions about what it means to be a volunteer in a carceral environment, to make meaningful connections, and to break bread and eat together. It is universal law that shared food unites people, even worlds apart. When I began working at the Petey Greene Program in the Fall of 2019, I came with the intention of building community. I designed gatherings that would allow volunteers to connect with one another to make meaning of their tutoring experience, learn from members of the community engaged with the carceral system, and come together in a way that repudiates the stark and often heavy nature of our work together. During this weekend, between completing paperwork, training modules, and run of the mill logistics, we ate together, got to know each other, and contemplated the forces that brought us to this wide-windowed room in the heart of East Liberty. At the conclusion of the weekend I was able to hear what went well and what didn’t, the things that stood out, that stung, or that informed. This concretized for me the need to have spaces like this, often, to make meaning, to problematize, to ensure that there is room to process, and to unite around our shared passion for helping incarcerated learners. We were making our own little community. Unfortunately, we would soon be introduced to the COVID 19 pandemic, and our understanding of community and how to cultivate it would be challenged.
Building Community Between Volunteers and Students
At the Petey Greene Program, we often refer to Freedom Dreams, a concept developed by historian Robin D.G. Kelly in his work Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. In our context it describes the myriad ways incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people envision their lives changing as a result of their education. It is what they hope for, what they believe they can accomplish, and is the guiding factor in determining their more finite goals through the semesters. But dreams die in darkness and isolation, and we cannot discount the importance of company that recognizes, fosters and fans the flame of our dreams. Our tutors support the vision of these dreams at the end of the tunnel while our students toil towards them, challenges be damned. The type of community that tutors and students build in their pairings is the type that we believe fosters a nurturing learning environment, one that is rooted in trust and mutually assured success. Students learn best from people they like and trust, and when intrinsic motivation fails, the knowledge that someone is rooting for you, someone is paying attention to your success, is often the saving grace. The success of students in the Pittsburgh region and beyond is largely because of their own dogged determination to improve their lives, but the importance of being in community cannot be overstated. For incarcerated learners, being able to build relationships and community with their tutors from semester to semester, and not being alone in the pursuit of their goal, has made an enormous impact.
“The type of community that tutors and students build in their pairings is the type that we believe fosters a nurturing learning environment, one that is rooted in trust and mutually assured success. Students learn best from people they like and trust, and when intrinsic motivation fails, the knowledge that someone is rooting for you, someone is paying attention to your success, is often the saving grace. ”
Impacts of Carcerality on the Community
For communities that have been torn apart by the impacts of incarceration, community building is an act of resistance and healing. In our tutor training we screen a video titled Mass Incarceration, Visualized, in which sociologist Bruce Western animates the impact of the carceral state beyond the individual. He states “We’ve gotten to the point now where there’s about 1.2 million African American children with parents who are incarcerated, about 1 in 9.” He goes on to list out the consequences of these absences, such as low school achievement, behavioral problems, depressive symptoms and more, putting special emphasis on the generational impacts: Children with incarcerated parents are more likely to inherit incarceration themselves. In this we see not just the disappearance of a person from the community, but the loss of a parent and the way that echoes in the lives of children. The ripple effect cannot be overstated—the carceral system tears apart the fabric of a community, creating holes where once stood a person potentially in need of rehabilitation, and beyond that, the disappearance of the potential for good. The community bearing the impact of carcerality is no new concept, but in absence of abolition and reform, we must consider community building as a harm reduction strategy. Observing and building on community assets in the form of education, resource sharing, and engaging the minds and spirits of those who may otherwise never explore this issue all contribute to repairing the fabric of communities torn asunder by the carceral state. Only by engaging communities and their members from an asset- based perspective can we gather these experiences and begin to change the narrative that mass incarceration has spun.
Petey Greene and the Community (Impacts of and Response to COVID)
Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr. was a man of the people. From his exploits coaching a youth football team when he was barely out of puberty himself, to his jailhouse and army shenanigans, and ultimately to his time as a radio personality and leader of community-based programs, Petey Greene never stopped championing the common man and believing in second chances. “The people Petey most wanted to inspire– ” Lurma Rackley writes in her biography of him published years after his death, “whose lives he most wanted his to guide– were the vulnerable ones, the poor ones, the ones whose existences reflected his childhood.” Having experienced being a member of almost every social class one could imagine, Petey Greene brought with him the understanding that the “little people” were the most central to the conversation and to moving the needle for everyone, and he never stopped prioritizing their voices. The Pandemic exposed us to the stark realities of the ways in which our society has little to no safety net, and that our most vulnerable will be least protected. While the impact of the Pandemic is incalculable at this stage, we witnessed firsthand the way we were isolated, disconnected, and struggled to find ways to build and progress. It seemed like time stood still yet somehow had to keep moving forward.
From this darkness emerged critical initiatives that would serve to clarify our work at the PGP. So we marched on, launching the Justice Education Series, a series of webinars educating the public on the needs and opportunities to effect change in the criminal legal system. In the Pittsburgh region, we successfully launched the Leadership Development series, a forum engaging volunteers in discussions with local community leaders involved in changing the criminal legal system. Through these virtual engagements, we began to rekindle those feelings of greater purpose and meaning. Volunteers and community members could explore ideas of abolition, reform, education in prison, and systemic change from right at home. Back at the center were the voices of people directly involved in reshaping the carceral system, and learning from them is the very fabric of our organization. While some of the pleasure of being able to connect in person was missing, the access to our work was expanding and more people could be present. And thus, our community grew.
Conclusion
We have deep and important work to do, and we must be whole and feel supported to do it. In Pleasure Activism, Adrienne Marie Brown explores the need for those in social justice work to challenge the notion that this work must simply be work and cannot feel good. There must be practices that heal and restore, that resist the seemingly inevitable burnout. We are entrenched in a fight for all people to have access to a meaningful life enriched by education, but even fighters must rest, must heal, must laugh, and know joy and ease. There is joy in community, in the joint pursuit of ideals, and in the decision to carry the load together. “Many hands make light work,” the West African proverb says. Our volunteers and students deserve to know the many ways that education and advocacy, albeit serious, do not have to be stifling endeavors; that they can, and should, lead to rewarding and fulfilling relationships and experiences, even within the boundaries of our work and its carceral nature. What we didn’t know the first time we gathered in January of 2020 was what was to come, and how it would challenge us to continue to see purpose and possibility. We were made to redefine our community makeup and find new ways to connect to and support one another, as well as keep our own heads above water. We could no longer break bread together as we had, and share the spontaneous, tiny moments that forge bonds. But we were and are committed to doing the work. We must be creative, intentional, and relentless in rejecting the carceral chokehold on individuals, families, and communities, and we can only do that through collective will, and a culture of building together no matter how far apart we may seem.
“We are entrenched in a fight for all people to have access to a meaningful life enriched by education, but even fighters must rest, must heal, must laugh, and know joy and ease. There is joy in community, in the joint pursuit of ideals, and in the decision to carry the load together. ”