Transforming Reentry Workforce Through Tech, Real-World Experiences, and Research
Research shows that involvement in the criminal legal system can pervasively and seriously damage prospects for employment, training, and earnings over an individual’s working career. Both the time spent incarcerated and myriad collateral consequences of a criminal record restrict access to certain occupations and job sectors and underpin hiring practices that have a debilitating impact on an individual’s ability to rebuild and reintegrate into society and severely limit their economic mobility.
The collaboration between AIR and Flikshop is enhancing interventions aimed at transforming lives. This partnership fosters innovation and ensures that reentry initiatives are both feasible and effective.
- Caitlin Dawkins, Project Director
With generous support from the AIR Opportunity Fund, AIR, in collaboration with the Perspectives Partnership—a DC-based nonprofit organization with a significant initiative to introduce 100,000 individuals to tech and knowledge-based industries are—are conducting a developmental evaluation of the Perspective Partnership’s Flikshop continuum of coordinated reentry supports.
This evaluation will highlight how real-world program implementation, flexibility, and compelling narratives, alongside formal structures, like evaluation, can enhance collaborations, partnerships, outcomes, and spark innovation.
The developmental evaluation is, combining the rigor of evaluation, being evidence-based and objective, with the role of organizational development coaching, which is change-oriented and relational, to merge research and practice in a way that builds an evidence base for reentry and sparks innovation.
