7 Questions with Bernadette Butler & Melanie Robledo
Bernadette Butler is the Director of the Housing Lab at Impact Justice, focusing on housing and reentry for systems-impacted individuals. Previously, she funded programs for first-generation college students and was a teacher and administrator in the California public school system with Teach For America. The daughter of immigrants from the Bronx, she holds a B.A. focused on policy and social justice from Georgetown University, where she also taught GED courses to incarcerated individuals.
Melanie Robledo, Senior Program Manager at Impact Justice’s Housing Lab, leads initiatives redefining reentry housing for formerly incarcerated individuals. She leads the Homecoming Project’s women’s reentry housing pilot and the organization’s technical assistance efforts with other housing partners. She also serves on Just Home Los Angeles and the Cal ICH Lived Experience Advisory Board, influencing housing policies, as well as the Board of Directors at A New Way of Life. Previously, she was the Housing Project Manager at the Center for Employment Opportunities in Los Angeles.
Tell us more about yourselves, The Homecoming Project, and the work that you’re doing.
Bernadette:
I can start off by sharing a little bit more about myself and the organization under which the Homecoming Project lives, which is Impact Justice. I am Bernadette Butler, the director of the Housing Lab, which includes the Homecoming Project. Impact Justice is a national research and innovation center that designs and scales criminal justice solutions all over the country, which is exciting. The work that we do focuses on three interrelated areas. One, we reduce the number of people who have contact with the criminal justice system. Two, we improve the lives of people who are in jails and prisons today. And three, we expand opportunities for people who are leaving the system to reach their full potential. I came into this work from the school-to-prison pipeline.
I really became interested in this work when I was doing fundraising. During COVID, my sibling became incarcerated. And during that time, simultaneously, I was also thinking about how I could leverage my interest in galvanizing communities and resources, and where resources are abundant and inspiring people to move those resources where there is an abundance to areas of our communities where there is not.
This is where I really started to lean in and learn a little bit more about the prison-to-homelessness pipeline. And as a former fundraiser, using the skills that I have and learning about homecoming, about how I could potentially use this as an opportunity to galvanize communities around people who have assets and want to leverage those assets to galvanize individuals, bring people home into a community with us. I am someone who, so a little bit more about me, and beyond being in this work as a former fundraiser and as a former educator, I’m someone who really believes in leveraging my voice unapologetically, even though I can’t say the word, to really talk about my own narrative, but also as a way to empower other people to explore theirs, to advance justice, but I’m also really fun, promise. I have an innate curiosity, and I’m also quite a bit of fun. And so, with that, I’ll turn it over to Melanie to share more about her story.
Melanie:
Thank you! You’re definitely more than just fun. It’s such a pleasure to work with you. You know, I’ll talk a little bit about the Homecoming Project and what it is, and then share a little bit more about myself. The Homecoming Project is an innovative six-month program that provides subsidies to homeowners and eligible hosts with an extra room and an open mind in exchange for opening living space to a person leaving prison. We think about this work as reentry and homelessness being totally intertwined. And I know this not just from my professional experience, but also from my personal experience. That’s why I fell in love with this program. It’s always been love at first sight for me. And now, as the senior program manager overseeing our LA housing programs, I get to fall deeper in love with the program, the people, and its purpose every single day. What I haven’t shared about myself is what my personal experience is. And I’ll share that for more than just half a decade, I’ve battled challenges with mental health, substance abuse, on the street homelessness, violence and incarceration, but today and for the last four years since my last release, my last, last release, I’ve leveraged every dark moment to build systems, trust, spaces, people and possibilities. I don’t just talk about transformation, I architect it. It comes from a deep-rooted drive to make things right in a world that has gotten so much wrong, particularly for people who’ve been dismissed, discarded, or dehumanized. My work is an extension of my values, but more than that, it’s an act of defiance against the idea that some lives are disposable.
How did the Homecoming Project start?
Bernadette:
The Homecoming project started about six years ago, in the Bay Area. Our president and founder, Alex Buzanski, and a few board members learned a little bit about the sharing economy, leveraging experiences and lessons learned from what was already happening with organizations and companies like Airbnb, and realized that some communities were being left out of that model and thought, well, what if we were to take the lessons learned coming out of companies like, again, the sharing economy, businesses, other businesses were using this shared economy model as well, and said, what if we were to take this model and build upon it, really supporting the people who are coming home from incarceration?
Impact Justice took from this idea and started asking people in the community, faith-based organizations, who they thought, these might be people who would, who are mission aligned, who might be in support of bringing people back into community with, know, bringing back formerly incarcerated people in a community with us. And the idea sounded crazy, quite frankly, to a lot of people. Then some others said, I would sign up to do this. Other folks who thought that this was a good idea were already volunteering in reentry spaces or in criminal justice spaces such as San Quentin. And so that was another place where our leaders, organizational leaders, and some consultants that we were working with said, go there, find out what other people would want out of this program if they were volunteering with Impact Justice to do this with the Homecoming Project. And not only did we ask potential hosts, we call those folks hosts, people, community members who are opening their rooms and have open minds, but we also asked prospective participants, people who would really directly benefit from the program and come back to our communities with us.
One of the places where we went early on was San Quentin, and we started asking people who were residents what they would want out of this program. At the time, there weren’t a lot of financial resources to get the program off the ground. Impact Justice started with what it had. We were a three-month-long program with just beds, essentially spare rooms to offer. But we had a very generous grant from Enterprise Community Solutions, and with that innovation fund came credibility and the necessary resources to do the program right and layer in additional programming support for the participants, training for the hosts, and the resources to also extend the program to six months and to get some staffing and really launch the program much closer to what it is today than it was back then.
What roadblocks did your organization face in starting it?
Bernadette:
Sometimes it’s throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, which is what a lot of innovators do. I don’t know of any that got it right the first time. A lot of the best ideas were mistakes, like Post-its. I use Post-it notes all the time. The biggest challenge that we face right now is that we work with a highly stigmatized and highly stereotyped community.
We often must reframe what it means to be vulnerable. We have to change the narrative about what it means to be vulnerable. I used to work with kids in underserved communities. It was very easy as a fundraiser to say we need funds for this particular school because of the population that we were serving. And I’ll turn it over to Melanie to talk a little bit more about this, but it is incredibly challenging for people to make the pivot to understand that individuals who are formerly incarcerated, they too are vulnerable. They are 10 times more likely to experience homelessness than individuals who are not formerly incarcerated. When people think of formerly incarcerated individuals, they often think about their own safety and their own vulnerability. But in fact, formerly incarcerated individuals are also incredibly vulnerable.
The data is clear. When you walk into a prison, you see how systemic inequity has played out in outcomes in prison. You don’t see a representative population. And you see this systemic inequity also play out in education outcomes and housing outcomes in the same way that you do in criminal justice.
Melanie:
I want to talk a little bit more about the barriers that we might face when we’re talking about assumptions that the broader society has. One of the things that I hear often is that they don’t deserve it when I’m speaking about formerly incarcerated individuals, right? They have it easy. How is it that someone’s getting out of prison, and they made all these mistakes, and you’re just giving them free housing, right?
Everyone deserves access to opportunity. They don’t have it easy. There is nothing easy about getting someone back on the road to social and economic opportunity who’s been gone for so long. I read somewhere that 48,000 collateral consequences stand in the way of someone being able to access things like employment and housing. We give them six months of housing, we do, but make no mistake, they have to do so much to be able to get back on their feet. This is where opportunity meets hard work. And that translates as Bernadette mentions in our outcomes. Zero percent recidivism, substantial long-term housing, economic, and academic opportunity. This is the truth about this group of people. And this is the truth where we need our hosts, our communities, and our society broadly to begin to understand.
How do you get folks to make space in their homes for folks who have been incarcerated? What does that look like?
Melanie:
I’ll share a little bit about how we seek participants and how we gain their trust in entering our program. I formerly worked at the Center for Employment Opportunities, where I had the opportunity to design a housing model and weave it into their current employment model. I spoke about this particular program with the Homecoming Project during their orientation—that housing is more than just housing. It’s a launch pad for everything else: leadership development, economic mobility, family unification, thriving communities, all of those amazing things that come out of having stable and safe housing.
When we’re talking to the participants, we want to be clear about what our program is doing for them. We share with them that from day one, we assign them a community navigator, someone to walk alongside them to be able to design a roadmap for what it looks like to ensure that they have viable employment or some source of income upon completion of the program. And in addition to that, they have a long-term stable housing post program.
Bernadette:
We at Homecoming find the credible messengers in the community who will help us recruit both hosts and participants. So, on the participant side, we recruit people who work at community-based organizations, and we say, "This Melanie lady who works at this particular community-based organization, she seems incredibly credible and can help us find the right participants that we need. Let’s explain to her what the right criteria are for our program, make sure she’s clear on that, and she can help us find the folks that we need. And also, let’s bring a participant to a meeting that she’s having at her organization so that another credible messenger can help recruit other participants.”
On the other side, for hosts, we do the same thing. It might be a church leader, a faith-based leader. If we know, for example, want to meet hosts and participants where they are, literally and figuratively, we know that a lot of our hosts come from faith-based organizations. So, we’re going to look for those church leaders who are trusted in their communities. And that might be a faith-based leader, it might be a pastor at a church, or it might be someone who is spearheading a faith-based initiative at a more regional or local level. We ask them to introduce us to the 50 pastors in their faith-based circle, to then ask them to invite us to all of their congregations. And then we get up in front of all of those pulpits, and up there with us at the pulpit when we are making a pitch to all those congregants, we have with us another host, so another credible messenger.
Do you have a favorite story of a host you can share?
Bernadette:
I have a new one that I would love to share. Her name is Adrienne, and she just finished hosting one of our participants, David. And she was my favorite host before she started this process because she was so incredibly enthusiastic about starting this process, and then I loved the relationship she and her husband, Steve, had entering this process. We just had this really lovely relationship. So as part of this process, we get to know and understand the host and where their alignment is, and what they understand about the reentry population. And with Adrienne, we learned about her that she’s an entrepreneur and she’s an author.
They were both really excited about this opportunity, and they met Dave during this call, which we call a meet and greet process, and they hit it off immediately. David and Adrienne have connected over their love of books and their love of dogs. David just published his first book, and he did so at the prompting of Adrienne, who has herself again written books. And the name of the book is Healing Paws with Patience: The Power of Patience in Healing Traumatized Dogs, and it’s an Amazon bestseller.
When I asked Adrienne about it, as she was off-boarding, we do these exit interviews, and I said, Adrienne, has your perspective of the reentry population changed? She said, absolutely, my god, it has. I thought she was going to say a little because she was already so open-minded about it. And I said, well, how? And she said, because when I started this process, I thought that people who were coming back from incarceration, I thought that when they were incarcerated, I thought they were just kind of living under a rock. David has become like a friend, and he’s written books, and I haven’t had the success that he has had with his book. I mean, like how many of us can say that we’ve published books?
The narrative that we have about folks who are formerly incarcerated, but also the belief that we have nothing in common with folks who are formerly incarcerated, and or that they can’t succeed.
What we don’t think about is the flip side of it, which is what the hosts get out of the process, and also what the broader community gets when we allow people to meet their full potential. When potential and opportunity come together, communities get a huge advantage out of that. There’s a boost that is given to everyone, which is, think, we all need to, if and when we can, make sure that we’re ensuring that we’re giving resources everywhere so that people can meet their full potential.
Can you share an example of a moment when a narrative was flipped, maybe a policy win, a media piece, or even just a community meeting, that helped shift perceptions?
Bernadette:
Part of it is the outcomes that we have collectively, the successes that we can name, besides our participants leaving our program, is that 0 % of our participants have gone back to prison, and to date, we have housed over 200 participants. Now that number is going to quadruple in a very short period of time because of the work that we are continuing to do and how we’re innovating and making sure that we are recruiting more hosts, and we are housing participants, and we’re making sure that they have full-time jobs and that they have housing of their own long-term.
The bottom line is that people who are coming out of prison, they don’t want to go back to prison. And we want to ensure that not only that, right, the bar of not going back to prison, that’s a low bar. The bigger thing is that they’re doing things that we have, and we have this anecdotal data. So not only do we have this quantitative data that is collective, we’re about to launch a long-term study about where our participants go and what the outcomes are that they have, but we also have these qualitative stories about folks like David, folks who are starting their own nonprofits, individuals who have homes that they have purchased. To be able to say that you have purchased a house in a market like today, and then housing crisis areas like the Bay Area or Los Angeles, that’s success, period, right? Full stop. How we have been able to galvanize people around us is to say, look at our participants, look at people, and say that is a huge testament to the will and strength and grit and determination of people who have said, I’m not going back.
Melanie:
As I was cycling in and out of these systems, and the systems I’m speaking to are mostly about homelessness and incarceration, there was a point where I felt like I was a burden on communities. I felt like all the work that they were doing for me almost felt like charity. And I didn’t want to feel that way. There had to be a way where we’re able to pivot the conversation from charity to dignity and equity. I’m speaking from my personal experience, but every single person that I know who’s been formerly incarcerated isn’t looking for a handout. They are looking for opportunities to contribute and feel connected to the community. They’re looking to be seen as who they are today, who they want to be, and who they want to become, right? Not who they were at one point in time. When we’re talking about our participants, we’re talking about people who have spent 10 years or longer consecutively incarcerated.
You’re not the same person you were 10 years ago, right? And neither are these folks. Formerly incarcerated people, including myself, have an enormous capacity to contribute and make a difference. I am so full of joy and gratitude every single day that I get to do this work because not only does it give me purpose, but it also reminds me that I am not a liability. I’m an asset.
For our listeners, especially those newer to this work, what’s a common mistake you see well-meaning allies or organizations make when trying to engage with stereotyped communities?
Melanie:
Language and framing matter tremendously. We’re talking about people here. One of the most common mistakes that I see is using phrases like return home. When we’re talking about the intersectionality between homelessness and reentry, but then we’re saying in that same line that people return home, it’s a bit confusing. We’re not really being clear about what the problem is and where the need is. Additionally, I’ll share that I often hear homeless people. People aren’t homeless. That’s not a characteristic of who they are at their core. It’s a condition. It’s an experience.
Bernadette:
This is one of the reasons why it is so critical for organizations to have people at the table who reflect those who are being served. Melanie has been thoughtful about how she brings this up, so much so that every time I’m about to say people coming home from incarceration, I stumble on the word home. Words matter.
Individuals who are coming home from incarceration are another group. We used to say formally incarcerated individuals because that’s what’s universally acceptable, but it’s not people-centered. People-centered puts individuals first, individuals who are coming home, individuals, right? That’s people centered is, putting those first. So I’ve learned so much about this work from my colleagues, who we are talking about, and it helps to have them in the room.
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