The Strength of Prison Education: Maintaining Community Post-release

Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison (Hudson Link) is a nonprofit focused on providing college education, life skills, and re-entry support to incarcerated men and women to make a positive impact on their lives, families, and communities. Hudson Link engaged the Capstone team to help locate, survey, and maintain ongoing contact with over 1,000 alumni. The team’s goal was to familiarize themselves with higher education in prison programs and help answer this question: how do organizations who serve formerly incarcerated individuals continue to engage their alumni post-release? The team developed collection systems and communication plans to survey alumni and retrieve contact information continuously. Through online surveying, phone banking, engagement of software providers, and stakeholder analysis of participants and similar organizations, the team provided Hudson Link with the necessary tools to survey alumni annually, establish ongoing communications, and collect participant data that will inform programmatic decisions.