King County Racism, Public Health Crisis Proposal

Question 1: Project Name

Answer 1: Anti-racist Pathway to Digital Liberation

Question 2: Amount of funding being requested

Answer 2: $550,000

Question 3: Application questions (Part 1): Basic organizational information and eligibility confirmation

Answer 3:

Service to King County residents
Organizational type
Organizational size
Please confirm that your organization is doing all of the following: (I) Dismantling systemic racism and working to undo its harms to address the public health crisis; (II) Reflective of the Black and/or Indigenous communities you serve as indicated by how you center your work in traditions, cultural practices, and approaches to providing services; (IV) Able to advance the priorities and well-being of these communities who are most harmed by racism.

Question 4A: Application questions (Part 2): Storytelling narrative about the organization’s work

Answer 4A: Instructions: Please provide a narrative for each question below. A full and complete response to a question is one that speaks to most if not all the bullet points in that question. We prefer that applicants share their full stories in short versions and limit their application to the equivalent of less than 7 pages if you are using another word processor or text editor to create your application responses, and/or no more than 4 minutes per question, if submitted by audio or video. Please use Documents tab to upload supplementary application material.

Question 4B: Share your story of making a difference in the local community and your community-led work in tackling racism as a public health crisis in Black and/or Indigenous communities. Please consider most or all of the following: (a) Share what your organization does, whom you serve (be as specific as you can), the specific programs and services you provide, your history of change by doing the work, and how your organization is already making a difference for local Black and/or Indigenous people and communities; (b) Tell us how your organization got started, how you have built connections in this community, and how long you have been serving this community; (c) Describe how your organization centers traditions, histories and cultural practices of local Black and/or Indigenous people and communities. What is your approach to incorporating Black and/or Indigenous communities in your organization’s structures, staffing, programs, decision making, and services? (d) Describe what makes your organization well-positioned to do the work you do; (e) How does your organization’s work create healing and restoration for the community you serve, and begin to undo the harms of racism?

Answer 4B: Prison Scholar Fund is a 16-year-old 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people who have been in conflict with the criminal legal system. We believe in the potential of formerly incarcerated people to transform their own lives and their communities and work to create access to opportunities for this most marginalized category of our society. The people closest to the problem are often closest to the solution, but furthest from resources and opportunities. Prison Scholar Fund is bridging that opportunity gap with direct services, organizing, and policy work — seeking to address systemic racism at its root causes.

We got our start connecting people in carceral settings to higher education. Prison is a dark, hopeless place where (mostly Black and brown) bodies are warehoused in concrete cages the size of parking spaces. Our founder, Dirk, believed in extending the educational opportunities he had while living behind the walls to his brothers and sisters struggling to reimagine their future beyond those walls. PSF has awarded 135 scholarships to people living in prison. We have also worked in coalition with other voices to mobilize directly-impacted people of color to advocate for systemic change — resulting in the restoration of federal grants to people in carceral spaces, enacted in 2020 and going into effect this summer.

Because of Dirk’s 15-year experience of incarceration, and because our organization exclusively hires formerly incarcerated people who lead with the conviction of their personal lived experience in these systems, PSF is a credible messenger to our community and has deep ties with that community. We are supported by a diverse, 14-person Board of Directors, half of whom have lived behind the walls.

We are one of the largest food distributors in Washington State, providing culturally appropriate nutrition to over a thousand families living on the margins of society due to impact by incarceration.

PSF is now the leading Digital Equity provider to people living with a record in Washington State. We provide in-person and online trainings to formerly incarcerated people in basic computer skills and digital literacy. Through our digital navigation program we work directly with people reentering the community to connect them to resources key to their success, such as housing, education, employment, and healthcare. We also support returning citizens in learning how to access digital spaces and tools themselves — which is a giant barrier for people who have lived behind the walls for long periods of time with absolutely no access to the digital realm or internet-connected devices. We also provide directly-impacted persons with free laptops and smartphones and walk them through enrollment in the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program to access free or reduced cost broadband services.

Black and Indigenous people are dramatically disproportionately impacted by our criminal legal system and a majority of our clients self-identify as members of Tribe or of the Black community.

It is crucial to operate from a credible messenger model with vulnerable and marginalized populations. PSF centers the Black and Indigenous experiences by hiring people from those communities who have been where our clients have been, speak the language of carceral settings, understand the dislocation and trauma, and authentically embody the history and culture of the communities we support. We began with an idea from a prisoner living in a concrete cage to help give hope to his fellow prisoners. We couldn’t be closer to our community than cellmates and neighbors, and that makes us the perfect group to build community power and enhance access to opportunity for people living with a conviction history.

As an organization, we believe metrics of success are key to charting our future. We engage in data generation and data analysis to better understand what is working and not working, and the best way to gauge success is through the lived experience of our community members. PSF focuses on both quantitative metrics of success (e.g. number of people who have been placed in jobs and average salary of those jobs) as well as qualitative metrics that reflect the experience of clients. Through these combined lenses we are able to measure both the what (quantitative) and the why (qualitative). We also rely on a method known as “over sampling” to ensure that our data fairly represents the most marginalized Black and brown community members.

The American criminal legal system is the epitome of racism in the US — it is literally enslavement 2.0 masked with a false moral veneer (“public safety”). Our organization is dedicated to dismantling the so-called collateral consequences of interaction with the criminal legal system while empowering the families directly impacted by these systems to thrive in and rebuild their communities. PSF provides education, skills, resources, and community building to make that happen. We’re applying to the Gathering Collective to radically increase and reintensify our focus on Black community members in King County and create a new effort led by an Indigenous person to engage with the Tribes in King County to provide wrap-around community support to Indigenous persons impacted by the racist carceral system.

Question 4C: Share your vision for the future, and what your needs are to help you build capacity to have your vision come to life. Please consider most or all of the following:

Answer 4C: Describe what your organization would need to sustain or build upon the positive impact your work brings to local Black and/or Indigenous people and communities.

The Prison Scholar Fund has been searching for resources to launch a new effort focused on Tribal communities. We have developed a very successful program for engaging people who are returning from prison with key services to help them bridge the digital divide, learn the skills essential to success in a 21st century economy, and connect with opportunities to rebuild their lives and strengthen their communities. However, the need is always greater than the capacity to meet it. We aspire to hire a directly-impacted Indigenous person to lead our relationship-building and service work in Tribal communities in Washington State. The goal is to build culturally resonate services for Indigenous people coming home from prison to connect them to opportunities, support, and people who understand the deep trauma they’ve experienced and can help to identify paths to improve their lives.

Additionally, we seek resources to hire caseworkers to provide additional trainings and one-on-one digital navigation services to people coming home in the Black community in King County.

How would you measure the positive impact?

We began as an organization dedicated to creating opportunity (and hope) through education in dark places. Our guiding light has always been the pursuit of excellence. If we focus on excellence in our services, success will inevitably follow.

Success is realized through well-being and freedom. Systemic racism keeps BIPOC communities down — we’re dedicated to finding ways to lift them back up. The extent to which that happens is how we track whether we are delivering upon our vision for more just communities.

As we briefly discussed above in response to Question No. 1, we use a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure our impact on the communities we serve. Quantitative data helps us better understand the what; qualitative data helps us piece together the why. Together, this information provides the basis for our data analysis. We also rely on a technique called oversampling to ensure that more marginalized voices are considered fairly in the data — incomplete data leads to unfair conclusions.

In very concrete terms for this project, we measure success through the number of our clients who:

Achieve digitally literacy
Successfully navigate the internet to search for jobs
Access health care
Engagement with us and their community
Land new jobs

Question 5: Candidates from the Coding Bootcamp: Tell us about the timeline for that change, and where you are currently;

Answer 5:

The amazing thing about this work is how quickly it is possible to change lives. So many people returning from carceral spaces are eager to rebuild their lives and show how much they have to contribute to their families and communities. The barriers are serious and challenging, but it does not take long to help someone feel confident enough to use a smartphone or give them the basics of how to use a laptop. And these devices are portals through which they can access the entire world. It’s a powerful and empowering experience for people who have been cut off from the world for so long through our racist systems of “incapacitation.”

PSF jumpstarts the process by putting laptops into the hands of people to reactivate them (it’s the opposite of incapacitation because it makes people capable and able to do for themselves). We forecast the ability to hold 24 trainings over the first 6 months of the grant cycle which will directly impact the lives of approximately 960 people.

Our Coding Bootcamp only takes 14 weeks from start to finish, starting with computer basics. The life cycle of that program is closer to 6 months when you factor in the recruitment process to identify capable candidates and the start times of the Boot Camp sessions. Our services continue past the completion of the Boot Camp as we help them secure employment in the tech industry.

While the concrete impacts of our direct interventions have appeared instantly, the longer term community effects take longer to show. The more Black and Indigenous people are thriving in King County, and the more visible they are, the more it wears down our systemic racism and helps to dismantle the tools of that oppression like the carceral system.

Question 6: Speak to your staffing needs, needs for those staff to have a healthy quality of life, and any additional funding needs outside of staffing to build sustainability for your vision;

Answer 6: The key resource we need as an organization to build our anti-racist work helping formerly incarcerated people returning home is skilled, compassionate people to do the work. That is where your investment in our vision for creating change is pivotal. We want to hire four key roles to provide services to Black and Indigenous people in King County: a Director of Digital Equity, an Employment Navigator, a Reentry specialist, and an Ops Manager. We also need resources to support the vision at the top of the organization (our CEO) to supervise and lead the work.

Our budget also includes minimal funds for supplies for those staff (e.g. laptops, toner) as well as infrastructure (office rent and utilities).

Question 7: Describe any capacity-building activities and strategies you would take on with this funding and when you would expect to do them (if your organization is seeking to grow, change or add to current functions and services).

Answer 7: The Gathering Collective RFP is an exciting opportunity to make our work sustainable. We launched our Digital Equity initiative with a large grant from the Washington State Dept. of Commerce. We hope to expand from our current 6-month contract to be able to continue to provide these key services to community members. This work has become a lifeline for community members and has so much capacity for growth and engagement with at-risk members of our community.

We would launch this project immediately upon receipt of an award letter from the Gathering Collective. The first phase would last 2-4 weeks and would involve strategic planning and candidate searches to fill the planned new roles. We are especially keen to bring on a new staff person from the Indigenous community who is directly-impacted (along with the rest of our staff) and uniquely qualified to engage with Tribes to connect people to key services. We know how deeply underserved this population presently is.

The second phase involves on-boarding new staff and training them to fulfill their roles in the community. They will shadow current staff to learn their roles and begin with a series of soft launches to test and refine their skill sets for delivering services. During this period we will begin to prime our networks to ensure that there are community members lined up to receive additional services during the rollout. This phase will last 3 weeks.

The third phase is program rollout and involves continuing to build engagement through our networks and leaning into the resources available from King County to identify eligible community members. We will begin to host events in the community, including holding training sessions at the Amazon Web Services Skill Center. It’s key to go where the community is, so we will use multiple venues spread out geographically to be as accessible as possible to community members. Part of the rollout phase involves reassessment of our product delivery to ensure that it meets community standards and functions in practice the way it was designed. This phase will take 6-8 weeks.

The fourth phase will be product delivery. This will account for the remainder of the grant period and focuses on people working in the community with other people to build power and opportunity. It includes period self-assessments to ensure that our activities are creating the most amount of positive change for the maximum number of community members.

Question 8: How will those activities improve the services you provide in Black and/or Indigenous communities in King County? (Examples of what it could look like include but not limited to: increase the number of people you serve by %, improve the quality of services you provide by doing a client needs survey, design new programs or serve a new population of clients, etc.)

Answer 8: The Prison Scholar Fund has been searching for resources to launch a new effort focused on Tribal communities on land that has long been home to the Muckleshoot and Snoqualmie Tribes. Along with the Duwamish Tribe, Native American culture and history has always been a vital part of the region that became King County.

We have developed a very successful program for engaging people who are returning from prison with key services to help them bridge the digital divide, learn the skills essential to success in a 21st century economy, and connect with opportunities to rebuild their lives and strengthen their communities. However, the need is always greater than the capacity to meet it. We aspire to hire a directly-impacted Indigenous person to lead our relationship-building and service work in Tribal communities in Washington State. The goal is to build culturally resonate services for Indigenous people coming home from prison to connect them to opportunities, support, and people who understand the deep trauma they’ve experienced and can help to identify paths to improve their lives.

Additionally, we seek resources to hire caseworkers to provide additional training and one-on-one digital navigation services to people coming home in the Black community in King County.

We began as an organization dedicated to creating opportunity (and hope) through education in dark places. Our guiding light has always been the pursuit of excellence. If we focus on excellence in our services, success will inevitably follow.

Success is realized through well-being and freedom. Systemic racism keeps BIPOC communities down — we’re dedicated to finding ways to lift them back up. The extent to which that happens is how we track whether we are delivering upon our vision for more just communities.

As we briefly discussed above in response to Question No. 1, we use a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure our impact on the communities we serve. Quantitative data helps us better understand the what; qualitative data helps us piece together the why. Together, this information provides the basis for our data analysis. We also rely on a technique called oversampling to ensure that more marginalized voices are considered fairly in the data — incomplete data leads to unfair conclusions.

In very concrete terms for this project, we have deliverable measurements for each initiative we are developing under this project. The Digital Equity Director will be responsible for the number of clients who achieve digital literacy and learn to successfully navigate the internet to search for jobs. The Employment Navigator will be responsible for tracking the number of individuals who successfully applied for and obtained employment, as well as the Coding Bootcamp graduates, and how many of those graduates are successfully placed in the tech industry. The CEO will track engagement rates with the organization and community, as well as the number of people successfully enrolled in healthcare.

Question 9: Describe the need you are trying to meet in the community you serve and the gap you are trying to fill. Take a moment to really give yourself and your idea the credit they deserve! Please consider most or all of the following: (a) Describe what issues and challenges your organization is trying to address in the community through the work you do; (b) Speak to your vision for local Black and/or Indigenous people and communities, in light of those challenges; (c) Share the practical ways your organization’s work gets closer to that vision; (d) Elaborate on what success and impact look like currently, and how you measure it in the work you do. Describe what approaches you will use to gather data that tells the story of your impact in the community. How will you use that data and inform the community on the data you collect?

Answer 9: We believe that communities are stronger and healthier when persons who have been in conflict with the law are welcomed home and supported with access to opportunities to rebuild their lives and relationships. In King County, when people return to our community after periods of incarceration they face myriad, virtually insurmountable barriers to reintegration and restoration. We recognize that underlying these systems of perpetual punishment and marginalization — the revolving door of incarceration for low-income people of color in neighborhoods — is a criminal legal system built upon and driven by systemic racism.

To address the root causes of racism, Prison Scholar Fund is disrupting that revolving door by connecting low-income people returning home to our community with resources and opportunities to grow, rebuild, and establish a strong foundation for their futures and the families and communities who depend on them. The majority of people we serve are people of color, especially in the Black community. (We aspire to expand our capacity to focus a project on the unique needs of the Indigenous community in King County through this grant.)

We do this through Digital Equity services — providing formerly incarcerated people with resources and training to bridge the digital divide. The internet is integral to our economy today. It is virtually impossible to function in our society without digital literacy; and fluency in cyber spaces is becoming as important as language fluency. People coming home from prison have often spent years or decades in a digital desert devoid of 21st century technology. They might not know how to use a smartphone, much less how to use it to access medicaid or food stamps. They definitely don’t know how to use LinkedIn to create a profile or look for work.

PSF begins this work by equipping low-income people with laptops and smartphones. We work with clients to help them enroll in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program to get them access to free (or low cost) broadband service. Using a philosophy similar to the housing-first model, we believe that building digital citizenship begins with giving folks a digital place to live (e.g. their own device). From there they have ownership and access to the tools to build a future — which is where we begin to provide training in soft and hard technical skills.

Many people require assistance from our staff to connect to services. This is where our Digital Navigation work comes in, a subcategory of Digital Equity. The World Wide Web is a big place and it’s easy for returning citizens to get lost trying to enroll in the essential safety net services they qualify for. We have staff to walk them through that.

For those further along their reentry journey, PSF is a leader in Washington State in providing concrete, marketable skills in technology to formerly incarcerated persons to qualify them for a sustainable and fulfilling professional career in the tech industry. We have partnered with Coding Dojo to provide a free Coding Bootcamp for qualified people returning to our community after a period of incarceration. Unlike many other industries, the technology field is somewhat unique in that the primary qualifier is one’s ability to do the work — they don’t care where you went to college or even if you went to college. They are also willing to overlook historical records of conviction: they care about who you are now and what your skills are.

We know how much talent and genius there is behind the walls, because our founder was there to see it first hand. He lived with his fellow prisoners for 15 long years. Imagine if those fathers, brothers, and sons were given the chance to shine? PSF’s model allows people coming home with zero experience in computer science — including people who might never have even used a computer — to get a free laptop, get free broadband, learn the basic digital literacy skills, and then enroll in our Coding Bootcamp to emerge with the skills to land a job as a coder.

Prison Scholar Fund knows how important relationships are, and we invest staff time through our Employment Navigator in building those relationships in big tech here in King County to prepare the way for our Coding Bootcamp grads to get a toehold in the industry. We also realize how key role models are for people coming home and more broadly for the community as a whole. Our prison-to-programming pioneers illustrate the capacity for growth and well-being that people have whom our society once tried to simply throw away. That inspires others to pursue a similar path, and demonstrates to the broader society that we should create avenues of possibility rather than pipelines to prison for young people of color.

All data collected by PSF is collected with the express consent of the community members interacting with our organization. We explain at the beginning of events what data we collect about their engagement and how it helps us improve our delivery of services to the community. All of our metrics are also available to the community through our annual reports and any program specific reports we issue highlighting work in more thematic areas. All information is anonymized, unless express permission is granted by someone featured in a profiling story to illustrate the personal impact our work is having in the community. We conform to all normative data collection, data storage, and data erasure policies.

Question 10: Select one or more of the funding priority areas and community betterments that best describes your work in the community

Answer 10:

Economic Stability & Strengthening (select relevant community betterment and subcategories on ZoomGrants)
Education (select relevant community betterment and subcategories on ZoomGrants)
Power & Capacity Building (select relevant community betterment and subcategories on ZoomGrants)

Question 11: Select one or more of the priority areas and community betterments subcategories that best describe your work in the community.

Answer 11:

Increase investments in efforts that center and advance Black and/or Indigenous joy, play, wellness, mental health, and resilience
Increase investments in efforts that center and advance Black and/or Indigenous joy, play, wellness, mental health, and resilience
Help youth get better education and allow them to build leadership and cognitive skills

Question 12: Select one or more of the priority areas and community betterments subcategories that best describe your work in the community.

Answer 12:

Support new and developing entrepreneurship in Black and/or Indigenous communities Provide a social safety net to be able to support people in meeting their material needs
Provide a social safety net to be able to support people in meeting their material needs
Increase access to Black and/or Indigenous-rooted education opportunities for STEM for Black and/or Indigenous families and their children
Invest in and/or increase access to mentors, field trips, afterschool snacks and activities, etc.
Support new and developing entrepreneurship in Black and/or Indigenous communities
Grow regional advocacy and power to continue this work

Question 13: Tell us how much funding you are requesting and what gaps this funding will help meet for your organization.

Answer 13: We are requesting $546,082.00 to dramatically expand our work supporting vulnerable persons in the BIPOC community who are returning from periods of incarceration. These resources will allow us to provide digital equity, digital navigation, and employment support to bridge the gap driven by systemic racism and compounded by the racist carceral system in the U.S.

Question 14: How is PSF funded

Answer 14: PSF is presently funded by a combination of in-kind donations (64%), government funds (14%), grants from private foundations (11%), and individual contributions (11%). PSF got its start while our founder was imprisoned, seeking to bring his brothers the same opportunity to learn and grow that he had while living behind the walls. When the pandemic shut down essentially all educational opportunities in carceral settings, our organization was approached by food security groups to help bridge the swelling need for access to culturally relevant nutrition resources. PSF pivoted in response to the emergency, becoming one of the largest food distributors in Washington State. The Covid-19 emergency has highlighted the importance of the role of the internet in our daily lives. Digital literacy is pivotal to navigating the most essential aspects of our lives from health and child care to education and employment.

Question 15: Share how you see this funding being able to strengthen and/or sustain your work and help address the issues you are tackling in the community. Be specific in sharing the benefits your organization will provide to Black and/or Indigenous communities.

Answer 15: Our vision is centered around increasing access to opportunity for people who have experienced incarceration to rebuild communities and lives — that work centers around Black and Indigenous communities in King County who are disproportionately harmed by systemic racism enshrined and exercised through the criminal legal system. PSF will be able to increase our interaction with Black directly impacted people by 300 people (a 375 percent increase over our present level of client engagement). We will launch a new project focused exclusively on bridging the digital divide for Indigenous clients in the Muckleshoot Tribe, Snoqualmie Tribe, and Duwamish Tribe — as well as other Indigenous individuals who now live here in the local community regardless of Tribe.

Question 16:Tell us how the work you are doing is intergenerational, honoring ancestors and lifting up the next generation.

Answer 16: PSF is grounded in the value of credible messengers. Every employee at our organization is leading with conviction, anchoring our lived experience. This practice is a core example of intergenerational community building, connecting youth to the wisdom of the old heads. Part of that experience is the description and realization of how systemic racism drives the carceral system’s deliberate impact on Black and Indigenous communities — to help them connect to the pride of their heritage and recognize the true causes of the adversity they have experienced. It’s key to shift the fame from the choices of an individual to the broad systemic causes that have driven entire generations into a New Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration.

Question 17: Share your story of how you are building community leadership (instead of individual leadership).

Answer 17: PSF builds community leadership in two key ways: (1) connecting families to possibility, and (2) empowering individuals to raise the bar for all. A recognition of the interdependent nature of reality is at the heart of our work. We believe that all people are connected; the well-being of one of us impacts all of us. Prison Scholar Fund is investing in the community by helping families connect to healthcare, childcare, education, and pathways to sustainable employment. The individuals we invest in are our brothers, sons, fathers — their well-being impacts those who love them and depend on them. PSF is committed to building access to opportunity in the communities most deeply cut off from freedom and possibility by generational trauma.

We have witnessed firsthand the ripple effect that specific investments have on elevating entire neighborhoods. Every time someone who is formerly incarcerated is able to reintegrate into the community as a successful member of society, that person empowers the broader community by demonstrating a realistic, culturally resonant path to liberation.

It inspires us every day how much talent and resilience there is in the community of people coming home from our prisons. But it is simultaneously heartbreaking how many systemic barriers they are forced to encounter during their journey, and how deeply harmed many of our brothers and sisters have been by these systems. We have encountered people who have never used a computer in their lives, self-limiting beliefs in what kind of work people who looked like them are able to do, supervising officers who have restricted access to basic tools to navigate the digital world like a smartphone to someone on probation then wanted to violate him for not having a job. Sometimes it has been difficult to identify people in the state of mind to take advantage of our more advanced training in computer engineering so that they can achieve sustainable careers in tech. The talent is unquestionably there, but it is often a struggle to find people who are willing to harness their own talent.

Community awareness and being consciously together can heal so many wounds. It’s possible to accomplish things in community and with the support of our fellows that seems daunting and impossible alone.

Question 18: Share how your work is helping change systems and policies toward racial justice for Black and/or Indigenous people and communities. Please consider most or all of the following: (a) Describe the types of systems you are working to change and transform. What population groups are you working with (youth, seniors, adults)? What have been your wins? What are the barriers you face? (b) Speak about any work you are doing in organizing and movement building; (c) Share how the work you are doing currently is tackling the root causes of racism; (d) How might King County as a government effectively partner, support and/or inform you to be effective in your work?

Answer 18: PSF helped drive systemic policy change through federal Pell Grant restoration in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. This historic shift in education policy for people in carceral settings reversed the ban on Pell Grant eligibility and paved the way for the wholesale return of federally funded access to higher education for our brothers and sisters behind the walls — which, when effected this July, will open new doors to people who have had all of them closed for far too long. As part of this initiative, we mobilized the voices of community members and built consensus and energy from people with lived experience to demand equal access to education for persons in carceral spaces.

The root cause of racism is a complex issue that has historical, cultural, and systemic factors. The history of colonization, slavery, and discrimination has created deep-seated biases and prejudices that continue to affect individuals, communities, and institutions. Systemic racism, such as unequal access to education, employment, and healthcare, perpetuates these biases and reinforces racial disparities. Additionally, implicit bias and stereotypes can lead to discriminatory behavior, even among well-intentioned individuals. Addressing racism requires a multi-faceted approach that includes education, policy change, community engagement, and systemic reform. The grant application from Gathering Collective of King County in Washington State to help Indigenous and Black people is an important step towards addressing the impacts of racism and advancing racial justice.

PSF is addressing systemic economic inequalities that have been created by centuries of racism and discrimination by increasing access to opportunity in Black and Indigenous communities. We do this through three key programs: Food Security, Digital Equity (including Digital Navigation), and Coding Bootcamp. By providing resources to historically marginalized communities, PSF is laying foundations for economic power and capacity. We further center the voice of Black and Indigenous people in decision-making processes that affect their lives. For example, PSF is supporting advocacy, organizing, and digital skills development programs that help Indigenous and Black people to speak up for their rights and challenge systemic racism.

To address the root causes of racism we believe in providing financial support, capacity building through education and outreach programs, and investing in promoting awareness about the importance of racial justice. The Black Lives Matter framework runs through all of our community building work. This leads to a more informed and engaged community committed to anti-racist values and cognizant of the pressing need for systemic approaches to reform.

King County is in an amazing and pivotal position to support work to combat racism by streamlining reentry for Black and Indigenous persons when they return to the community. King County can also highlight the success of our prison-to-programming pioneers, connect more people in need of Digital Equity and Digital Navigation services to our organization, and hold up what’s possible when we offer opportunities to people instead of punishing the symptoms of the problem.

PSF also would benefit from more connection to the constellation of other key organizational voices in these spaces to begin to collaborate, build ties, and connect our clients to other services they might benefit from. For example, King County might have a clearer understanding of the full network of groups engaging with the community on key issues that our clients might benefit from in terms of grassroots advocacy development. Perhaps King County or a nonprofit organization receiving funding from the Gathering Collaborative might be interested in hiring directly-impacted community members (just as our group does). The possibilities for collaboration and synergy are endless in the battle against systemic racism in our community.

Question 19: Describe your existing infrastructure that demonstrates your ability to manage these funds. Do you plan to have another organization act as fiscal sponsor? If yes, indicate the name of the organization and contact information.

Answer 19: The Prison Scholar Fund comfortably manages budgets around one million dollars (2021, $1,210,160; 2022, over $1m, and not finalized yet), including the administration of $849,000 in grant funds from Washington State and the United States government. We have a track record of successful grant reports and completion of our grants. Our accounting system provides reporting for discrete grant contracts, Our organization has a robust Board of Directors who function as fiduciaries for our organization. We have an external accountant manage our books and prepare our IRS Form 990s. PSF’s track record as a steward for community funds is clear from our work in the field providing services to clients. We are a registered 501(c)3. Our EIN is 41-2175677 and our Unique Entity ID is ERAMVYMWKM99.