Since 2018, the nonprofit Next Chapter has trained more than 30 apprentices who have gone on to secure full-time jobs in tech. Originally incubated at Slack, Next Chapter grew out of a desire to create opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals to work in tech. Slack has already helped recruit 14 more companies as hiring partners for Next Chapter, and with the release of a new playbook today, they hope to inspire more companies to follow suit.
The playbook, a joint project from Slack and the Aspen Institute, draws from Next Chapter’s work to provide a guide for companies that may want to hire formerly incarcerated workers but aren’t sure where to begin or how best to support those employees. Beyond making the case to companies that perhaps haven’t entertained the idea, it lays out potential legal and logistical challenges that employers may encounter, from state laws that restrict hiring practices, to customer data policies that might apply to people with a criminal record.
The playbook also addresses the more nebulous barriers to training and employing formerly incarcerated workers, many of which have to do with culture. As staff writer Adele Peters wrote in Fast Company earlier this year, similar apprenticeship programs haven’t been as effective as Next Chapter, in part because companies didn’t adequately support employees after they were hired or take broader steps to foster a welcoming environment.
“The biggest challenge that we face, over and over and over again, is the fear and the stigma that’s associated with people leaving incarcerated settings,” says Kenyatta Leal, the executive director of Next Chapter. “Working with the engineering teams, legal, and HR to create an environment where people feel like they belong is really a big part of the work that we do.”
Bringing in these employees requires a company-wide investment in their success–a commitment that Leal says Slack modeled in its work with Next Chapter. That can include training managers and educating their workforce on appropriate language, but also providing formerly incarcerated workers with access to resources on, say, financial literacy and clearly communicating workplace rights.
While the playbook makes a more explicit appeal to tech companies, Leal hopes it can be a source of inspiration for other types of organizations as well, especially if they purport to care about equity and inclusion. “This work that we’re doing right now has the power to translate to other industries,” he says. “I like to think of what we’re doing as, we built this underground railroad from the prison yard into the tech space. And I feel like this playbook could really help us go from this underground railroad to a five-lane highway.”
With just 31 graduates, Next Chapter’s footprint is still relatively small, given its hiring partners boast thousands or even tens of thousands of employees. But Leal believes that they’ve proven the model works. “Just a couple of years ago, there were a lot of people telling us that this is too hard, that this can’t be done, that no one’s going to hire these people, that these people don’t have what it takes to be successful in this space,” he says. “But we’ve proven every one of those doubters wrong. And we’ve got a lot more to accomplish.”
