Some Nonprofit Execs Took Hard Road To C-Suite

Jaws dropped recently when the new head of a celebrated British children’s charity was revealed to have served time for a murder he committed decades earlier as a teenaged gang member. The conviction resurfaced after Action for Children CEO Paul Carberry, now 60, was seen hobnobbing and posing for photos at a charity fundraiser with the Prince and Princess of Wales after years spent working for the organization as a social worker and later as its national director for Scotland. Other formerly incarcerated individuals have found their own success as authors, entrepreneurs, technology CEOs, and nonprofit founders and executives. As impressive and even inspiring as their stories might be, those numbers still pale in comparison with the vastly greater numbers of those who have borne the burden of a criminal past they’ve been unable to overcome.

An estimated two-thirds of the more than 650,000 men and women released from American prisons each year will eventually wind up back behind bars, some for technical violations of their probation or parole. Others lapse back into the criminal subculture that landed them there in the first place. The challenges of trying to find housing and employment while overcoming drug addiction and years of separation from their communities, often with little or no education or work experience and a criminal past they must now explain to an employer, can prove more than they can handle.

One of the pioneering efforts to flip the script on this narrative took root with the 1967 founding of The Fortune Society. The New York City-based nonprofit began as an advocacy organization for formerly incarcerated individuals and evolved into a service organization. The name came from an off-Broadway play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, that author John Herbert wrote based on his own traumatic prison experiences.

So moved was the play’s producer, David Rothenberg, that he wound up creating The Fortune Society to educate the public about the criminal justice system and to advocate for those who had experienced it firsthand.

The Fortune Society’s deputy CEO, Stanley Richards, is a former inmate of New York’s Rikers Island correctional facility and is in line to succeed JoAnne Page, president and CEO of The Fortune Society, when she retires in the not-too-distant future. It’s been an incredible turnaround for the 62-year-old Richards, who began his descent into crime and drug addiction at age 10 by joining the Black Spades gang in the Bronx, N.Y., after his mother died. A robbery conviction after years of cycling in and out of jail that got him nine years behind bars.

“Growing up in the projects, gangs were like family. And I thought the streets and selling drugs and robbery and going to prison was how I was going to live my life forever, and I learned to live that life,” Richards told The Non- Profit Times. The old way of assisting formerly incarcerated persons with reentry too often involved a singular focus on job placement to the exclusion of other needs and services necessary to prepare them for work and other aspects of life in a world many hadn’t set foot in for decades. “The prison culture teaches you to live in a prison, but once you go outside those walls there are vastly different rules of the road in the community,” noted Page.

Studying for his GED and earning a college degree while in prison introduced Richards to a life he never imagined. He became such a model inmate that while still incarcerated he was appointed director of a transitional services program for other inmates preparing for release.

“I really enjoyed the work and helping people and wanted to continue doing that,” Richards recalled. “It wasn’t the punishment or the jail conditions or fear of standing in front of a judge that changed me, it was realizing that the things I believed about myself weren’t true and that I was actually smart and capable.”

Richards joined The Fortune Society shortly after his release at age 30 after several other nonprofits turned him down for jobs. “The Fortune Society was the organization that really walked the talk and valued what I brought to the table,” he said. He later directed a Hunter College research project involving prison inmates and recently served two years as the New York City Department of Correction’s first deputy commissioner, the first ever formerly incarcerated person in the department’s long history to graduate from DOC custody to serving in a senior leadership position. In that role, he directed day-to-day programs and operations for incarcerated persons.

“That was a full-circle moment for me,” Richards said. “My office was located on Rikers Island and overlooked the very building where I once spent time in solitary confinement. I remember walking from my office into that very building and seeing the yard I used to walk around, and now I was the second highest-ranking member of the Department of Correction.”

There is another slightly more high-profile example. In 1976, Charles Colson, former White House counsel for President Richard Nixon, emerged from a seven-month prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal with a newfound faith and determination to spread the message of love to fellow prisoners who had lost hope and been forgotten.

Prison Fellowship in Merrifield, Virginia, the nonprofit Colson founded, is today one of the largest organizations helping to assist formerly incarcerated individuals reentering society. “Even though we are a faith-based, Christian organization, our programs are open to anyone,” said Cody Wilde, the organization’s vice president of academy programs and field operations. “We want to provide a place for anyone to belong, regardless of what they believe.”

Many other nonprofits have followed suit in the decades since, each espousing a unique approach and philosophy but all with a common belief in the inherent human dignity and worth of each person who walks through their doors. Among them is a New Jersey nonprofit led by the state’s former governor, James McGreevey, who experienced his own fall from grace when he resigned from office amid scandal in 2004. Like many of the individuals he now counsels at New Jersey Reentry Corp., in Jersey City, where he serves as chairman and executive director, McGreevey had to figure a way to rebuild his career and reputation.

McGreevey’s journey led him to enroll as a seminary student where he worked with men and women returning home from prison. “It made me realize we all want the same things in life — the security of a safe home, a loving and supporting family, and the prospect of meaningful employment,” McGreevey told The NonProfit Times.

“The past practice was to simply identify any job opening that happened to be available and if the person lasted any length of time in that job, it was a minor miracle,” said McGreevey, whose organization also assists veterans returning to civilian life. “But what we understand today is the importance of first stabilizing the person for medical, behavioral, health, addiction, housing, and other needs and helping them secure identification documents that are essential for them to survive and to access an apartment, a job, and other benefits.”

That realization hit home for Ulysses McMillan, a 49-year-old New Jersey resident who last year finished serving 20 years in federal prison for drug tracking. During his imprisonment, the final three years of which were in solitary confinement, McMillan made peace with himself and his faith in God and even penned a novel, To Tell A Tale, based loosely on the life he left behind on the streets of Newark. “The transition for me started when I was still behind that wall, not after I got out,” Mc- Millan told The NonProfit Times.

“But the first thing I needed when I got out,” said McMillian, “was just clothes on my back, which a lot of people don’t put at the top of their list. But how are you going to talk to someone about a social security card, a birth certificate, and all those other credentials and things you need to find employment if you don’t have clothes?”

Before he could begin looking to the future, McMillan also had to confront a past debt obligation from two decades of unpaid child support and accrued interest totaling $50,000. He’s since begun paying it from work income he deposits into a bank account opened with the help of New Jersey Reentry. Such challenges aren’t unusual for formerly incarcerated individuals, many of whom McGreevey said are in desperate need of legal help to clear away the backwash of past warrants, fines and other obligations that have piled up over the years and can come back to haunt them when trying to rebuild their lives.

Recognizing these needs was what led The Fortune Society to grow from its initial inception as an advocacy organization into one that began doubling as a service provider, first for those needing substance abuse counseling and later housing. “We were not wanting to become housing providers ourselves but were unable to find decent housing for our clients who were trying to turn their lives around, so it was something borne out of necessity that has become a national model for other service providers,” Page said.

Resolving these issues is a prerequisite to job training and finding secure and gainful employment, which for most is the holy grail of long-term success. At New Jersey Reentry, a partnership with a local community college enables trainees to earn industry-recognized credentials such as CDL (commercial driver’s license), HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), EMT (emergency medical technician), medical coding and other certifications. The Fortune Society offers similar instruction that trainees can supplement with apprenticeships, which has the added benefit of allowing them to obtain personal references.