Our program has hoped to expand our offerings of business classes and workshops for years. Entrepreneurship is particularly valuable for people who are incarcerated, as self-employment is a way to avoid barriers in the job market and is a way to utilize people’s creativity and skills.
This weekend we concluded a three-part workshop on entrepreneurship with Professor Doug Wilson from the Lundquist School of Business. He integrated business fundamentals while sharing stories, answering questions, facilitating small group discussions, and doing a deeper dive into some of the particular industry areas that were of interest to our participants. Our final session had a record-breaking 33 participants, including both some regulars in our classes and people we had not met before. The workshop was held at Coffee Creek Minimum, meaning our participants were women either serving short sentences or nearing release after long sentences. They therefore brought high levels of motivation and thought to the topic, and some had detailed existing plans that we were able to discuss as a group. Another theme that emerged was the widespread desire to engage with the nonprofit sector—either directly or via a kind of for-profit/charitable collaboration to work with people experiencing poverty, in addiction recovery, and otherwise giving back to communities of people who are struggling. Discussing nonprofits from an entrepreneurial angle was particularly interesting and rewarding.
We are scheduled for workshops at CCCF the third Saturday of every month. In addition to entrepreneurship, we have offered a communication workshop and one on math and logic. We look forward to broadening the scope of topics over time, and also know that entrepreneurship will be a welcome topic at the other institutions.