Leading CUNY’s Freedom Prep for justice-impacted students

Mediator Stephanie Gilman is the founder of the Freedom Prep program at the City University of New York, a college transition program for justice system impacted students. Gilman also has served as a mediator for the New York Peace Institute, New York City Department of Education, and trained collaborative problem solving and restorative practices. Plus, she worked as the New York Regional Manager for buildOn, a national nonprofit organization that provides urban teens with intensive local and global community service opportunities. There she oversaw service, leadership development and education programs in 24 New York City public schools. She also currently serves on the board of directors of the Association for Conflict Resolution of Greater New York. 

New York Nonprofit Media caught up with Gilman as the Freedom Prep program begins winding down a four-year run to discuss its impacts and legacy. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about yourself: When did you know you would build a career in service of others? 

I started out as a theater artist. I was a director and ran a small, nonprofit, experimental company. I also taught movement theater at a conservatory. I always had some notion of “collectivity” and “community” and tried to build that ethos into my life through the arts. I tried to be in service to the artists with whom I worked, and the communities about which we were creating shows. One of the first shows my theater company created and produced came out of a collaboration with sex workers in New York City. We very much prioritized centering their voices and writing, and some of the performers in the production were members of the sex worker community We also collaborated with organizations that did outreach and provided services to sex workers and built the content of the show around what we learned from them as well. I have always had an interest in community and relationship building, and that has been coupled with a deep sense of outrage at inequality and injustice. 

I recently learned about Freedom Prep, a college transition program for justice system-impacted students that you started at CUNY. This is such an innovative approach to creating educational access and opportunity for young people who are so often cut off from it. Would you please tell me how it got started and why?

I began my work at CUNY in 2013 as a program developer for the Early College Initiative, which offers New York City public school students the opportunity to obtain up to 60 college credits through intensive partnerships between a DOE school and a CUNY college. At that time, I also taught drama classes in the evenings to adolescents at Rikers and Crossroads Juvenile Detention, through an amazing organization called Drama Club. I was keenly aware that although many of the students I met were exceptionally smart, they did not have the college access opportunities afforded to other city students. It seemed deeply wrong that, on top of everything else they were experiencing by being incarcerated, they should not get the higher ed/college access opportunities I was seeing other students get through CUNY. So, in 2018, I piloted the first Freedom Prep cohort in partnership with a fantastic community based organization, exalt. They serve court-involved young people and have a strong focus on education in their programming. I worked with a CUNY program called College Now which provided the mechanism to offer a single, credit bearing course, without students having to be matriculated. I created a draft curriculum I thought would be engaging and relevant to justice system-impacted students and vetted it with my colleague at exalt, which elevates expectations of personal success for youth who’ve been involved in the criminal justice system. We ran it by some of the young people they serve and got their stamp of approval. The readings addressed racial justice, civil rights, and critical race theory and our instructors were trained in the Reading Apprenticeship framework and trauma informed practices. We used texts such as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and Richard Wright’s “Black Boy” so our students could consider both how to construct the story of a life and how to tell stories about themselves. We grew to 4 cohorts, one of which I taught, and I had an amazing group of instructors teaching the others.

How did the students respond to the opportunities Freedom Prep offered to them? To the curriculum? 

Students responded strongly to the program and the curriculum. A lot of them told us they had felt in the past like college was out of reach or that they were not “college material.” Many of them had their education interrupted through involvement with the criminal legal system and other systemic barriers and weren’t sure how to find their way back. Freedom Prep’s model offered them a low stakes way to get their foot in the door and try a college class in a very supportive environment. We did end of semester surveys and students would report that they gained confidence in their reading and writing, that they never thought they could succeed in a college class and now they think they can, and that they wanted to continue their education. We also heard students say they didn’t know they enjoyed reading and that they now had a whole different relationship to reading and books. 

What do you think students most took away from participating? What did they learn about the world or themselves? 

We talked a lot about systemic oppression and access to education in our classes.  Our students saw how people like Richard Wright and Malcolm X were intentionally barred from education, due to the hoarding of power embedded in white supremacy. We read passages from “Coming of Age in Mississippi” by Anne Moody, “Zami” by Audre Lorde and Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. I think some of the students were able to have a sense of their own place in the world and their own power, and saw themselves reflected in the authors. 

How about you? What did you learn from them?I learned so much from the students, every day, every time I was with them. I don’t know if I can say succinctly all the things I learned, because each student brough something different to the class and program. I can say that I have read all the readings in the course many times, and each class discussion some student would say something new about a reading that made me see it in a different or new way. I remember a very powerful moment in a class when we were talking about Zami. We were dissecting her use of the term “outlaw” and how it has to do with being a nonconformist. One of my students said “Audre Lorde is like Tupac. She is a Thug who made her own way and didn’t care what people thought. Tupac was also a non-conformist.” I thought this was a brilliant connection I had never heard, and the other students jumped on with their own thoughts. We had an amazing discussion about creativity, non-conformity and being an “outlaw.” That’s just one example of the student’s generosity in the classroom and my learning from them. I certainly learned a lot about oppression, system involvement, my own privilege, and I think/hope I became a better teacher and program director. 

Working to make change within large systems is hard. Where did you meet resistance or face barriers? What did you do?

The College Now staff at LaGuardia Community College, which is the program and campus through which we ran Freedom Prep, were amazingly generous and flexible. College Now is primarily a program that partners with high schools, and students get registered in college classes with a high school transcript and DOE ID number. Many Freedom Prep students were older, didn’t have access to any information from high school and had no way of getting it. College Now let us use social security numbers to register students, and if students didn’t have that they would create a number for them. We didn’t meet resistance, but I did have to explain, at the beginning of Freedom Prep, why our students may not be able to have access to the same information as other students, and why their education trajectory may look different. We also ran cohorts of Freedom Prep in juvenile detention facilities and that presented a whole host of challenges, mostly related to security and protocols at the facilities. So, my experience was that it’s not so much resistance but how institutions are run that take some time to work around.

What were ways you adapted the program or curriculum as the program evolved? 

The biggest change was in spring of 2020, when we had to fully convert to remote operations, including recruitment and enrollment, all our classes and student support. Access to devices and reliable internet was a huge challenge for Freedom Prep students. Some of our students lived in spaces, including group homes and other institutional settings, where they did not have access to reliable internet or a quiet place to complete coursework. We were as flexible as possible with assignment submission deadlines and talking students through various scenarios for how to get their assignments completed. Freedom Prep staff and instructors made themselves available to students via phone and text. We applied and received funding to purchase additional devices for students for upcoming semesters and were able to supply students with laptops throughout the pandemic.

The other big change was hiring an additional full time staff person to support students with matriculation and next steps after their Freedom Prep class. Just the one class was never going to be enough and having a college counselor on staff who understood the unique needs of our students was a tremendous help. 

Unfortunately, after 4 years, this program is discontinuing. What do you hope lives on at CUNY or elsewhere? 

There are several excellent CUNY programs that support court- involved students: Project Impact at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Future Now at Bronx Community College and the John Jay Institute for Justice and Opportunity. I know the John Jay Institute is doing a lot of work around knowledge building and training CUNY campus staff to work with justice system impacted students. 

Freedom Prep was unique because we offered our specially designed credit bearing classes without students having to be matriculated. I hope CUNY continues to provide a way for students who have felt disconnected from education a supportive way to get connected. I also hope there is a way for the curriculum to live on, whether it’s for court involved students, or elsewhere. 

I also know that CUNY has been considering multiple ways to increase flexibility with how people enroll and take courses, and I think this will help our students a lot. I think hybrid (remote and in person) options, increased financial support for students who can only go part time or manage a few classes, as well as specialized college counseling and advising will all make a big difference.

And maybe, someday, Freedom Prep will be re-launched.

I’m sure it was hard to end the program after pouring so much of yourself into it and seeing the impact it’s had. What will you carry with you in your heart, knowing that it made a difference?

It was very hard to make the decision to leave, knowing the program would end, at least for now. We served several hundred students in our 4 years of operation, which is small for CUNY, but it was a lot for the kind of in depth, intensive programming we had. I will carry seeing our students and instructors in classes together having joyful discussions, animated debates and experiencing the intrinsic value of talking about something they read that inspired and/or challenged them. I will also carry knowing that treating our students with the utmost respect and valuing their humanity may have had an impact on how some of them see themselves. I will always be grateful for the generosity of our students with regards to how they shared themselves with us by participating in our classes and program. I really love the credible messenger mentoring model and saw such amazing examples of peer support and mentoring between Freedom Prep students. I hope we contributed in some small way to the power of our students building community together.

I have noticed an increased interest and innovation around supporting young people who have been system-impacted. What advice would you give to others who are seeking to work at the intersection of CJ and (higher) education? 

What helped us a lot was partnering with community-based organizations and credible messengers who worked in the field. When developing our curriculum, I vetted it with my colleague Brian Lewis, the chief operating officer at exalt. I also worked very closely with a CBO called Getting Out and Staying Out, the Future Now program at BCC and colleagues at ACS who worked in the juvenile detention facilities.  We had many conversations about the model and course content and what would work for the young people they served. I would definitely encourage people to seek out others doing similar work and learn from and partner with them. 

I would also suggest listening to the students and young people you serve and centering them in your programming as much as possible.

Laurel Dumont is a senior director of strategy and learning with Intentional Philanthropy, through which she serves as staff and advisor to several independent and family foundations.