Flip the Script Flips the Script on Incarceration

A Flip the Script advocacy group meeting

People who have been incarcerated don’t often get to tell their own stories. Employers, landlords, neighbors, and even friends and family members tend to assume the worst, to fill in blanks with stereotypes. For someone returning from prison, struggling to find a job, a place to live, to rebuild relationships in their community, it is hard to shake off the stories that other people tell about you, and often this leads to shame and embarrassment.

Central City Concern’s Flip the Script Re-Entry program provides culturally specific services that empower African American and Black adults returning to their communities from the justice system to tell their own stories, realize their potential, and pursue a path to success. Flip the Script aims to reduce recidivism and support clients in thriving after incarceration.

Flip the Script’s three primary goals:

• Reduce racial disparities in re-entry service outcomes (employment, average income, and housing)

• Engage clients to identify common struggles and needed system changes, and to advocate for policy changes at state and local levels

• Reduce recidivism overall and eliminate disparate rates of recidivism between racial and ethnic groups

While securing housing and employment are critical to success, Flip the Script also emphasizes the importance of building relationships and community, as well as a strong sense of self. Flip the Script applied to the Justice Reinvestment Equity Program (JREP) to secure funds and capacity building support for their advocacy group, which creates a welcoming space for African American and Black adults who have been involved in the justice system to connect with one another, heal, and build skills for re-entering society. Associate Director of Re-entry Services Medina Kurney, Advocacy Coordinator Billy Anfield and the rest of the Flip the Script team ensure that everyone who walks through the doors of Flip the Script feels welcomed and trusted, no matter who they are or what happened in their past.

Recognizing the benefits of peer support, Flip the Script’s staff comes from the community it serves. They have personal experience with the justice system, homelessness and substance use, and they frequently share their own stories with Flip the Script’s clients. Once a client has met their goals for housing and employment, they become Flip the Script “alumni,” and they often continue with the program and give back by supporting new members who come into the program. In fact, for this project, Flip the Script recruited a steering committee made up of Flip the Script advocacy group alumni to help create their “Advocacy Group 2.0.”

Advocacy Group 2.0 includes a monthly speaker series, covering topics such as culturally specific family dynamics for healing and reunification, spiritual and faith-based growth, and technology education with guests from Constructing Hope, Self Enhancement Inc., Partnership for Safety and Justice and more. The series may also include group outings to places and performances significant to African American and Black communities in Oregon and beyond, like a guided tour of VanPort, a Black Panther Legacy Tour of the Albina district, or a theater production. All activities are grounded in the African American and Black community and experience, creativity, genius and aspirations.

From Flip the Script’s application to JREP: “Flip the Script is a community space that offers a sense of home, healing, safety, sanctuary, and faith that reaches and influences far beyond the physical walls of the building itself. Black clients can step into a space they feel and claim to be their own, where faith is felt to the core and nurtured. From this place of strength, clients can reclaim their place in society.”

Some of the successes Flip the Script has seen so far include most clients completing their supervision, clients less than ten years out of prison purchasing homes, and clients visiting the Oregon State Capitol and speaking with legislators.

Thanks so much to Flip the Script and to your steering committee for all the work you’ve put into this project! We love what you’re doing.

The Justice Reinvestment Equity Program (JREP) supports culturally specific organizations and culturally responsive services in communities most harmed and least helped by Oregon’s criminal legal system. JREP seeks to elevate organizations that have been overlooked by traditional funding streams with the goals of reducing incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal legal system, promoting healing and advancing community safety in Oregon. Learn more about JREP.