The Literacy Council of White County, a nonprofit organization which is located in Searcy, Ark, and focused on adult literacy, has chosen our book, Jails to Jobs: Seven Steps to Becoming Employed, as the basis for its prison education program.
The council has been around for nearly 50 years. It works with people age 18 and up and serves White County, which has a population of 75,000, and an adjoining county with 10,000 people.
“The organization started out to be reading and writing. As the definition of literacy has changed our role has changed and expanded,” says Sarah Stieffel, the Literary Council’s former executive director. “We still do reading, but we also work one on one with people who struggle with dyslexia and reading difficulties.”
Literacy Council of White County offers variety of services
Along the way we also added tutoring to people who are in the local GED program, and then we moved into health literacy, financial literacy (basic budgeting) and digital literacy – computers and tablets – and general life skills, things you should have learned but didn’t. And what has become important for us is work skills – job placement and job readiness.”
In addition to its programs onsite, the Literacy Council of White County works with 50 families at a local homeless shelter, 40 women and 100 men at a substance use disorder (SUD) treatment facility. It also works with people at Searcy’s local homeless encampment, where they help people with finding housing, developing job skills, learning health literacy, obtaining cell phones and signing up for public assistance.
Grant allows council to teach job readiness in local detention center
The Literacy Council also offers a workforce readiness certificate that people can put on their resume. It covers everything from being on time to work, having a resume and looking people in the eye. The certificate includes “all of the workforce skills that a beginning worker should have,” according to Stieffel. “We’re trying to reach rural underserved populations.”
As part of a recent endeavor, the Literacy Council was invited by healthcare provider Arcare to be its education partner when it applied for a $1 million Transitions in Care for Justice-Involved Populations grant awarded by the U.S. Health Resources & Services Administration. The nonprofit is a sub-recipient of the grant, which means that Arcare is in charge. The Literacy Council receives a portion of the funding. This funding covers the salary of the organization’s assistant director, as well as the materials and resources it is using in its prison program.
Stieffel has been going into the local White Conty Detention Center once a week to teach job readiness and reentry skills as part of a program that began in August.
“Arcare chooses the participants,” Stieffel says. “They have to be within 90 days of release, be nonsexual and nonviolent offenders, and they have to be willing to participate in the program. Unofficially they’re looking at internal behavior compliance. They’re looking for people who would truly benefit from the program.” Most of the people involved have been incarcerated because of “failure to pay and drug involved charges,” according to Stieffel.
Participants receive Jails to Jobs: Seven Steps to Becoming Employed
Every participant gets a copy of our book, Jails to Jobs: Seven Steps to Becoming Employed, which is the basis for the course.
Because not everyone can participate in the program, it is expected that those who do will share what they learn. “I tell them that this program is limited, and you are a messenger to take the info back to your pod. You have the responsibility of sharing this message with others who want to receive it,” Stieffel says.
Although Stieffel does the actual teaching, Kim Careau, who – in addition to being a former college professor was also justice-involved – is in charge of the curriculum.
Careau says that there are four ground rules that serve as a foundation for the course:
- Be impeccable in your word.
- Don’t make assumptions.
- Don’t take everything personally.
- And always do your best.
“These are the rules of how we’re going to treat each other. We use each other’s first names. We agree to accept people for what we see in the classroom. Whatever they’ve done in the past is irrelevant,” Careau says.
The curriculum is based on our book, but Careau has incorporated other resources, including Steve Harvey’s Facebook reels, into the class.
She also wants to ensure our book is used by everyone who leaves the White County Detention Center.
“I want to transition this book outside of the jail. We’re working on a grant that parole could use to make reading it a requirement,” she says.
Her main goal goes beyond that, however.
“We want to get away from the recidivism mentality. You can commit a crime but can still be a success if you get your housing together or your work. There are different measures of success. We don’t define people by what they do but who they are,” she says.
Editor’s note: If you’re a literacy council employee, a prison or jail educator, a reentry counselor providing (or planning to provide) job search training, or a jail or prison librarian anywhere in the U.S., we invite you to contact us for a complimentary copy of Jails to Jobs: Seven Steps to Becoming Employed. We’ll also include a free slide deck to help you lead workshops based on the book.
