SECOND COHORT, APPOINTED AUGUST 2021

Willette Benford’s initial relationship with education was peppered with love and hatred. Growing up, she came to believe the lie that she could not learn. She began to hate attending class and ultimately dropped out of school in the ninth grade. During a period of incarceration, she was tested for school placement because it was a requirement. When she received her scores, she found that she had tested higher than anyone in the class. 30 days after the test she had her GED. This was only the beginning. Willette’s appetite had been whet. She finally realized that learning was something she possessed the intelligence to do and was quite capable of. From that point, she began to take every class available within the system. She attended classes for every available certificate, from cosmetology to business management and building maintenance. She ultimately acquired her associate’s degree. As time went on, school was taken out of the equation because the classes she needed to acquire her bachelor’s degree were no longer available.

While practicing her faith as a Christian, Willette began to teach Bible study. She did this for 13 years, becoming an ordained minister in 2007. In 2019, she started to work downtown at City Hall as a legislative assistant; she did that for about a year, switching jobs during the pandemic. In July 2020, Willette was offered the position as Decarceration Organizer for Live Free Illinois. Live Free is a faith-based organization, and she is responsible for organizing faith leaders, formerly incarcerated individuals, and community leaders around the issues that affect their communities. Last year her supervisor asked if she thought about going back to school. Needless to say she had not, yet at that moment the seed was planted.

As Willette began to think about completing her bachelor’s degree, she reached out to NEIU to inquire about classes and was connected with an amazing advisor who has supported her every step of the way. The support continued even when she did not enroll during the summer semester because of uncertainty. This fall she decided that she would no longer postpone enrollment and took the leap and enrolled. Willette was accepted as a senior, with 91 transferable credits. That was one of the most exciting pieces of news, since it meant that all of the inside work had eventually paid off. Past life experiences have made Willette think about studying theology, however, her path into the criminal justice reform space has her contemplating justice studies, too. (Mercy and justice, the two areas we can all benefit from.) In five years Willette would like to be a homeowner, have a master’s degree, while consulting and advising on reentry issues as an expert in the field, alongside a team of justice-impacted women that have been educated, activated, and politicized to do the same and are leading in these spaces.

Kevin Blumenberg is a citizen returning home after spending approximately 30 years in prison. If our environment educates us, it can also mis-educate us, and we can become a product of that environment. After going through his own personal transitions, Kevin didn’t want his experiences to become a disease to himself or others. In order to help others change in positive ways and to learn from his experiences, he realized he needed to build on his education so he could come back to his community and others like his to help others avoid the mistakes he once made.

Currently, Kevin works as a community navigator for a company called Acclivus, helping others get their criminal records expunged, find jobs, and get back in school. He also works for The People’s Lobby, with its Mass Liberation squad, fighting for the people’s rights and winning the Pretrial Fairness Act. And Kevin is helping Parole Illinois to bring back parole for people who have natural life sentences and have served 20 years. He works to convince state senators and representatives to aid in this fight. He’s also talking to commissioners to try to get American Rescue Fund money into the communities that need it most.

Kevin has credits toward his associate’s degree and eventually would like to obtain a master’s degree in Public Policy. He wants to create programs to help communities thrive in positive ways towards betterment, etc. In five years, he would like to have his own 501( c)(3) established and be in a position to help communities throughout the state.

Kevin Gardner (also known as Orion Meadows) is a Slam Performance Artist, activist, and author. He is currently a student at Northeastern Illinois University, participating in the University Without Walls program. He chose NEIU because he wanted the opportunity to trace his own path, pursuing something that interests him as an individual, but that also would provide a service to his demographic: the urban/hip-hop community. He has declared Urban/Hip-hop Aesthetics and Culture as his major, because as a youth he was molded by these cultural aesthetics, which continue to have a profound impact on his life. They have become ubiquitous among urban youth, and he feels the need to tap into them as a resource for educating, raising awareness, and sparking creativity in the communities where such aesthetics and culture are prevalent. Besides being a UWW student, Kevin works as a residential aid at The Pioneer House, which is a residence for homeless veterans and returning citizens. It is the vision of Eddie Beard, who devoted himself to providing shelter and better living conditions for the less fortunate people in the community.

As a creative artist and member of the hip-hop community, he has always been driven to go beyond the boundaries others have attempted to set for him. This was something he was compelled to do while incarcerated, when he tried to finance his own higher education but was denied by the prison administration. Instead of becoming discouraged, he was motivated to pursue education informally. He was infuriated, and out of sheet defiance, he aspired to acquire as much knowledge and education as he could to show the system that the fire burning in his soul was zealous and no authority was powerful enough to stifle his development. This was his enrollment in a “University Without Walls,” long before he’d been informed about and admitted into Northeastern’s program. To Kevin, the universe was his university, and he sought to allow his mind to venture far out into the boundlessness of the macrocosm, as he endeavored to harness the creativity of his imagination and develop his skill as a writer. He found liberation through education, honing his craft, and using it to assist others in attaining liberation for themselves. As time progressed, he began publishing his work.

Kevin’s goal is to elevate the aesthetics of the culture he was reared in, which have had such an impact on him, his contemporaries, and innumerable urban youth today. He hopes to contribute to the understanding and appreciation of cultural aesthetics of hip-hop, as an ambassador and practitioner of the urban literary arts, building an establishment where the people in the community will be immersed in the wondrous glory emanating from the creative expressions of their beautiful minds. This will be a beauty they can look upon and be proud of for generations, passing it along to posterity to preserve with dignity.

Pablo Mendoza is currently a Research Fellow for the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. He creates evaluation tools to answer the burning question: Is a community space that bridges the divide between incarcerated folks and their communities on the outside something that is needed/necessary? He has devised and implemented several evaluation tools to get at this question. Pablo is also using his lived experience to inform the development of the community space, particularly in terms of the traumas suffered by systems-impacted folks. He researches other organizations in order to be in community with and informed on best practices in the field of trauma-informed care.

The educational pathway that led Pablo to this moment involves the Education Justice Project. This in-prison higher education program introduced him to critical pedagogy, which changed his life forever. Because of this concept he was motivated to exercise his agency and advocate for the voiceless.

Pablo’s five-year goal is to finish his bachelor’s degree so that he can open a halfway house for returning citizens. He hopes to have a facility where folks can get on their feet and obtain the skills necessary to succeed in life. He will focus on immediate needs, like housing, to assuage their anxieties, also allowing for programming to deal with the trauma that contributes to recidivism–in short, taking a holistic approach to reentry.

Pablo’s interests are not tied to monetary gains. He aspires to create as much change as his efforts will allow and hopefully a bit more. His desires are tied to the youth of our communities because they will be the ones who will keep the ball rolling forward. Pablo strives to remove the stigma of poverty. He knows that is a lofty goal, but what is a dream if not something big? He would like to know that he contributed something to this world besides pain and sorrow. His dream is to bring about healing. Healing is something that is necessary but too rarely sought after or thought of. He hopes to change that.

As a young African American male, Kilroy Watkins was targeted by the late Lt. Commander Jon Burge and his officers, who tortured him into signing a false confession back in 1992. Said false confession eventually resulted in a guilty finding by the court and a sentence of nearly 60 yrs. Kilroy knew early on that in order to prove his innocence he must learn the law and how the criminal justice system works. This was the start of his journey back to school to acquire his GED and then to enroll in college, to obtain his paralegal certification. Kilroy’s paralegal certificate allowed him to obtain employment in the prison law library, to work on his case, and to continue his college education towards a degree. In his nearly 30 yrs of incarceration, he worked in five institutional law libraries and assisted thousands of his peers with appeals, grievances, civil lawsuits, and exonerations.

Kilroy now works as a Community Fellow with the Human Rights Lab at the University of Chicago. The Human Rights Lab is actively engaging communities, students, and scholars on the crises of mass incarceration and racialized policing. He has also worked as a member of the Advisory Council of the University of Illinois Education Justice Project Reentry Guide Initiative. Kilroy now aims to acquire his undergraduate degree, which will help him with his professional goal to open Freedom Schools, which would be led by torture survivors, formerly incarcerated people, and their family members. The Freedom Schools would serve the needs of the community and address social issues that have had an enormous impact on communities of color, who are often underrepresented and over-policed. The five-year plan would be to expand the Freedom Schools throughout the City of Chicago and pave the way to Freedom Houses for formerly incarcerated men and women, to help with their reentry skills and relationship building with family and friends.