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The 10 Local Charities I’m Supporting on Giving Tuesday

Nearly all of the people in New York’s jails and prisons will come home someday, and two venerable organizations, the Fortune Society (founded in the 1960s) and the Osborne Association (with roots in 19th-century reform movements), work with men and women during and after incarceration to help them get skills training, education, jobs, housing, and treatment for substance abuse and/or mental illness. It is difficult, demanding necessary work that needs more funding. Our tax dollars have already been spent to arrest, prosecute, jail, and imprison people; it only makes sense to spend a little more to complete the process and help people complete the process of rehabilitation and put violence and wrongdoing behind them for good.

“We are employing individuals who are from these communities, have experienced incarceration themselves as well. And that brings an incredible amount of trust and credibility to the work that we do on the inside,” Jonathan Monsalve, the president of Osborne, told me. “I think we as a city are missing a huge opportunity,” says Stanley Richards, the president of Fortune. “We know the majority of the people who are incarcerated are going to come home to our community, and people don’t come home a blank. They [need to] come home with hope, connection to services, with some willingness and capacity to build a better life, get access to housing, substance-abuse treatment, mental-health treatment, job placement, job retention, job training, skills — all those things we know make a difference for people when they come home from prison.”

Give to the Osborne Association and the Fortune Society.

Read more at Intelligencer Back

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