Robin Brownlee was not intentionally seeking out a sense of community or purpose after she was last released from prison. But in June, a friend invited her to a meeting for Unchained, a Syracuse-based nonprofit working to empower formerly and currently incarcerated people and shrink the carceral state in New York State. There, Brownlee found a community and a new source of purpose. She soon joined UnchainNY, a yearlong, paid apprenticeship program launched by Unchained this past summer to equip formerly incarcerated people with the skills necessary to become effective community organizers.According to Brownlee, four months into the program, she has more self-esteem than she’s ever had. She used to wake up depressed most mornings. Now, she wakes up early, excited for class, now reading more than she ever has.Brownlee sees the potential and power she’s always had but struggled to recognize in the past.Brownlee, 64, is one of four apprentices in the program. For 15 hours each week, UnchainNY apprentices work through an original curriculum that combines political education with community organizing skills. All apprentices were chosen from Unchained’s existing active members.Robin Brownlee, 64, is an apprentice in UnchainNY. Credit: Courtesy of Robin BrownleeUnchained’s work also pushes legislation that shrinks the reach of the prison system’s power in an effort to ultimately dismantle the prison system. In 2022, New York State enacted the Less is More Act, co-written and co-sponsored by Unchained, which addressed the disproportionate number of people in New York jails for non-criminal technical parole violations by enhanced due process for accused individuals and reducing the number of people on parole. Unchained co-founder and co-executive director Derek Singletary created the concept for the curriculum. Singletary, who is currently incarcerated, wanted the program to encompass what he has learned through sociology courses and his own exploration of texts on mass incarceration and Black literature while incarcerated.According to Singletary, his education empowered him and helped him reconceptualize his experiences as Black man from a low-income neighborhood.“The decisions I was making were not necessarily my decisions, they were programmed into my environment. I was being influenced to make them without really knowing it,” said Singletary. Singletary was first incarcerated at 16 and has cycled in and out of the prison system since then. He is serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted of manslaughter in 2011. “The knowledge I had gained really opened my eyes to the power I had and was not using,” said Singletary. “I was like ‘Oh, wow, I’ve been really playing myself the whole time, this is what they want me to do.’” While incarcerated, Singletary worked with doctoral student Shaneya Nyasia Simmelkjaer to design the political education portion of the curriculum that traces the history of Black Americans from pre-colonial Africa through mass criminalization and incarceration. It analyzes how these historical instances intersect with a racially class divided society, Simmelkjaer said. The program’s developers wanted to tell a fuller story of the history, culture, politics and contemporary socioeconomic inequalities of Black Americans. The hands-on community organizing portion of the curriculum consists of learning how to get access to elected officials, how to build support for legislative campaigns and how to organize events. “The people who are best suited to change the law are the people the laws are affecting. If I can help get people the knowledge of ‘how is this affecting me’ then they can have the understanding of how to change the laws,” said Singletary.Simmelkjaer, UnchainNY’s program coordinator, facilitates the political education portion of the program. Growing up in the Bronx, Simmelkjaer saw family members and peers cycled through the prison system. She’s seen the barriers they face trying to access meaningful jobs, housing and material needs after they were released.She included the language and frameworks from her formal education that helped her better conceptualize what was happening in her circles and community in the curriculum. The curriculum teaches the apprentices to consider ways beyond the current criminal legal system to prevent and respond to harm. Simmelkjaer said she’s encouraged the apprentices to consider what community accountability could look like without punitive measures, like prison. Simmelkjaer additionally teaches the apprentices reading, writing and comprehension skills. Most of the apprentices have been removed from school for over 10 years. According to Simmelkjaer, education has always been a barrier for them.Singletary’s wife, co-founder and co-executive director of Unchained, Emily NaPier Singletary, facilitates the community organizing portion of the program. She trains the apprentices in many of the tasks Unchained does on a daily basis as a nonprofit organization to participate themselves. According to NaPier Singletary, UnchainNY differs from other programs working with formerly incarcerated people because of its focus on empowerment rather than service.“Most people when they think of working with formerly incarcerated people they are thinking of providing services to them,” said NaPier Singletary. “This is a totally different approach where these are not people who need charity but are people with power who just need to learn how to tap into it.”Singletary hopes the program will expand as new cohorts of apprentices graduate each year. The program plans to help apprentices find jobs in the advocacy field after they graduate.“What I really hope comes from this, is that people can take this knowledge, go home with it, talk to their husbands or their wives, talk to their kids, and then pass it on. That knowledge doesn’t just die, it is propagated,” Singletary said. For Brownlee, the program has contributed to her healing. It gave her an outlet beyond poetry, which she began writing while in prison after her mother’s passing.After previous stints in prison, Brownlee felt institutionalized. She found herself doing things to go back because it felt familiar — life outside could feel so lonely. UnchainNY brought a sense of community. At an event earlier this year, Brownlee introduced her poetry to her community — she read a poem to the other apprentices titled “One Sweet Day,” written in memory of her mother. She hopes to pay forward some of the knowledge she’s gained through UnchainNY to people who’ve had similar experiences surviving violence and cycling in and out of the prison system. Writing is one way she hopes to do that, including through an autobiography she wrote in a marble notebook, Forgetting Those Things Which Are Behind Me. “I used to think when things happen to me, if I pack and go somewhere else, things would get better. But I packed up that same negative spirit,” said Brownlee. “I couldn’t see it, but there was a lot for me. I was blinded.”The post How a Syracuse-based nonprofit’s apprenticeship is empowering formerly incarcerated people appeared first on Central Current.