“Can I use your phone?” I asked a lady at the Greyhound Bus Station in Muncy. As she started to hand me her smart phone, I asked: “Can you dial the number? I don’t know how to use that.” Thankfully, she was happy to help.
No one sat next to me on my way home on the Greyhound bus following my release from prison. It was a pretty day, and the greenery of Central Pennsylvania rolled by. But I was nervous. Extremely nervous.
Walking out of the State Correctional Institution Muncy, I felt like I was floating above the sidewalk. Now, with time to think, it hit me: I had spent much of my 20s making mistakes connected to crack cocaine, and much of my 30s locked up. Now I was in my early 40s, thinking and praying: “I hope I don’t mess up again. God, I’ll dedicate this year to you. Just please help me to get myself together.”
But I had no idea how to get myself together. I assumed it would involve a job. But how do I create a resume — especially with my past? If I get an interview, what do I wear? Perfume, or no? What will the interviewer ask, and how should I answer?
I didn’t even know how to use the new phones.
That was more than 15 years ago.
Fast forward to last month
A few weeks ago, on a mid-December evening, I handed certificates to three men, including Terrill Weatherspoon.
Terrill, like me, got in trouble with substances. On that December night, he’d be returning to a halfway house. For two hours, though, we were together with a few dozen people in the basement of the Pittsburgh Mennonite Church, celebrating the graduations of Terrill and three other men from the Colorful Backgrounds EXPO, a program I launched a few years ago.
A jail stay as a teen led me to advocacy, but incarceration leads many to ruin
EXPO stands for Ex-Incarcerated People Organizing. The graduates spent the prior 11 Tuesday nights getting organized, through courses on anger management, mental health, computer literacy, job hunting, money management, civics, leadership, etiquette and criminal record expungement.
Even with that preparation, Terrill was feeling some butterflies. “You come out of jail, you’re putting in an application, they flag you because of your background,” he said in conversation. But now he had some tools in his belt. “God willing, I’ll get a good job and everything will fall into place.”
I knew exactly what he meant. I’d learned a lot of lessons in 2007, and it took 14 years — and lots of help from others — for me to convert that experience into an organization which is built to last.
Lesson 1: It’s not easy having a colorful background
You think serving time is hard. It is, but leaving prison can be even harder. As one Colorful Backgrounds graduate said, the world “will eat you up and swallow you and put you right back” in prison.
That’s in part because the world you return to may not be the world you left.
I grew up in Broadhead Manor, a public housing community in Pittsburgh’s Fairywood neighborhood. Growing up, we had everything: rec centers, track and field facilities, families that kept an eye on each other. But when I got out of state custody, Broadhead was gone — demolished, like so many public housing communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Truthfully, I didn’t mind. Broadhead’s disappearance was one more reason to start fresh.
But how?
I was lucky to have a case manager who asked me what I needed. I told her I needed help finding a job, so she sent me to a career development course. That career development course saved my life, and stuck with me when I found myself, much later, in a position to help others.
After working up a resume, going through mock interviews, learning when to send a thank-you card, figuring out what to do with my napkin at a business lunch and countless other lessons, I started submitting applications. The POISE Foundation invited me to an interview.
I remember walking into their offices at Two Gateway Center. I thought: “Oh my God, I’m not getting this job! Look at this place.” But after three interviews, POISE President and CEO Mark Lewis said, “You just need a chance.”
Truthfully, I would’ve taken a job at McDonald’s at that point. POISE, though, allowed me to learn nonprofit management while starting to think big.
Lesson 2: Start wherever, but grow
The seed of Colorful Backgrounds was planted by that career development course, but watered by Barack Obama.
As Obama’s 2008 campaign picked up steam, somebody told me that I couldn’t vote, because of my record. Luckily, I did my research, and found out they were wrong. When I showed up at the polls for the first time, the line was around the corner. Passing cars were honking their support. It was like a party.
But a year later, with only local officials and judges on the ballot, I showed up at a nearly empty polling place. “What’s going on?” I wondered. It turned out the Black community wasn’t voting in near the numbers that it did in presidential years, even though local elections may be even more important to our everyday lives.
I mean, our youth were getting murdered. There was something triggered in me. I couldn’t keep complaining from the sideline. I had to get in the fight.
I drifted into activism, sometimes spending my lunch hour on Grant Street protesting against violence, for police accountability and about other causes. A few times my boss asked, “Did I see you on the news?” When your boss asks you that, in a skeptical tone, it might be time to change your passion to your profession.
I’ve seen Black mothers talk about ‘loss like it’s grocery shopping,’ and I’m dedicating myself to uplifting them
Lesson 3: Aim to sustain
I founded West End P.O.W.E.R., dedicated to activism, advocacy, education, equity and unity in communities of color and other underrepresented communities. That allowed me to work on voter empowerment, community advocacy and food security, among other issues. But something was gnawing at me.
Remember the career development program that saved my life? It closed a few months after I graduated. I heard the funding ran out. It wasn’t the only program for ex-incarcerated people, but with more than 13,000 people leaving Pennsylvania prisons each year, the demand is a lot higher than the supply.
In early 2021, I got a call from Illah Nourbakhsh at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for Shared Prosperity. “If you have a project, we may be able to endow it,” he said. I was like, is this a prank? He said, “No, it’s not a prank.”
The center pairs CMU’s expertise with community members’ passions, ambitions and skills. Illah’s offer to bring planning help and funding gave me hope that I could build a program like the one that saved my life, with some added civics and with staying power.
I had to envision a project, build a team and estimate the cost. It took nearly a year to put it all together, and we took in our first cohort in early 2022.
So far we’ve helped 38 ex-incarcerated people, in six cohorts, to prepare for life on the outside. Some, like Terrill, will apply what they’ve learned locally.
Luis Jimenez, though, plans to return home to North Carolina when he’s released from a halfway house here. “This was my first time being in jail,” he said as he ate at the graduation night dinner. He’ll come out with “a lot of perspective: The finances, the credit, the computer skills.”
Then there are students like Andre “Chewbacca” Gay. He did a half-century in prison, emerging last year at age 72. He told me, “I never even voted.” After he finally voted, he came to me and said, “Look what I did!” His smile was so big, you didn’t need to turn the lights on.
Getting out of prison, you always think that you have this horrible story that no one would ever understand. But if someone meets you where you are and gives you a chance, it is both humbling and empowering.
Working with Colorful Backgrounds students changes the way that I fight for them. Seeing them graduate, my heart swells for them — but also for those still locked up, or released with no one to help.
Terri Minor Spencer is the founder and president of West End P.O.W.E.R. and can be reached at 1terriminor@gmail.com.
Rich Lord is the managing editor at PublicSource and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
