We are SOLUTIONARIES
The Green Life Project collaborates with solutionaires from inside and outside communities that inspire and awaken our connection to the earth and each other by contributing to individual, community, and global transformation.
Green Life in San Quentin
The Green Life began as a vision in 2009 and developed into a peer education course that is continuously evolving and adapting to its members’ needs both inside and outside San Quentin. Green Life in San Quentin is an intensive curriculum of topics that integrate spiritual and practical pathways toward obtaining the necessary skills and temperament to perform in the new environmentally conscious America successfully.
It is a directive program, which includes identifying and assessing life skills, emotional readiness, and needs of inmates to address and focus on the issues and areas required to re-enter the new Green Economy. The course inspires accountability and emotional honestly on all levels, rebuilding integrity and self-esteem and enabling participants to move toward a life of positive contribution and service to society. Our course provides a safe, facilitated atmosphere that promotes inner self-evaluation and life-affirming motivations.
The Green Life serves as a pre-requisite for:
- Green Job Training
- And will make recommendations from its evaluated course participants to the next steps in a pathway toward successful living.
Over 100 men inside Quentin have committed to improving their lives and communities through their involvement with The Green Life program. Recognizing the environmental implications of their actions, many have successfully created sustainable practices within San Quentin. For example, Peer Leader Angel Alvarez started a save water campaign and a healthier food campaign, which had led to improvements in prisoner health and water use reduction.
In this co-creative, peer-educator learning environment, the men create and prepare, guide, and implement their curriculum for ecologically sustainable practices, thereby developing as facilitators, trainers, and leaders. By the end of the program, the men will have gained viable skills for enhancing their living conditions and invaluable personal leadership qualities for reentry to their communities.
“It is a learner centered, performance based program for inmates who want to be an asset to public safety and not a liability. By having employable skills we become positive healpers in our communities and not destroyers.”
Lawrence Blankenship
Green Life Peer Educator
LEADERSHIP & YOUTH OUTREACH PROGRAM
Green Life Leaders in Reentry and youth plan, design, and lead an online community reentry forum, COVID-19 safe outdoor socially distanced events in nature with East Oakland Youth, and community service projects in partnership with CURY J (Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice).
To support community and healing, we partner with the following organizations to implement this program:
- Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY)
- CURY J
- Aspire BuildOn
- Homies Empowerment
- Higher Ground NDC
- Young Women’s Freedom Center
- Canticle Farms
“My experience as one of the Green Life Leaders has broadened my knowledge of the impact poor environments have on residents. For example, people who reside in West Oakland stand a greater chance of being exposed to higher levels of black carbon. This exposure has been associated with higher accounts of astham, strokes, and congestive heart failure. As a Postgraduate Psychology Student, I am particularly interested in how these environmental dispartieis relate to crime and punishment.”
Jerry Elster
Founding Environmental Leader
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT WORKSHOPS
The Green Life Reentry Leadership group addresses disenfranchisement due to the punitive nature of the mass incarceration system and complex and bureaucratic reentry services for previously incarcerated individuals in the San Francisco Bay Area. We believe that “Healed people, heal people.” We immerse participants in the principles of healthy living in culturally relevant programs led by people who are impacted by the incarceration system.
Our Green Life Leaders:
- Support participants to see their place on the planet and in society.
- Provide a sense of greater opportunity, agency, and purpose.
- Foster positive relationship skills and empathy.
- Build a supportive community of peers and mentors.
- Provide leadership opportunities and facilitation training.
Along the way, we integrate and coordinate care management and guided access to a network of social service providers for housing, mental health, substance abuse, financial education, and legal services.
“I am sure that at one point in all of our lives we have all been part of the environmental problem. So now, I dedicated my time and efforts to be a part of the solution after joining The Green Life Community. I have become educated with the tools and knowledge needed to be a part of the solution that I once populated the community with. The Green Life Community has involved me in multiple environmental workshops that taught me preventive measured on hazardous waste, air pollution, and more.”
Terrence McRae
Founding Environmental Leader
REENTRY SERVICES
Green Life offers coordination services to community providers, Rites of Passage ceremonies, events and retreats in nature, individualized case management, and support and follow-up with housing, leadership, and job opportunities for formerly incarcerated people. Our projects in Alameda County have impacted over 100 men and women in reentry and their families over the past five years. We continue to engage with and conduct focus groups in Oakland to co-design programs with past participants of the Green Life (both inside and outside of prison) and key community members using lessons learned from past projects.
Green Life Reentry Successes Include:
- Providing hands-on and employable environmental skills training through workshops and mentoring.
- Educating the community about the potential of ecological and holistic design as a healing tool for reentry.
- Empowering participant leadership by advocating for the links between the health of our human selves and our planet through “earth connection.”
- Providing community-building events, nature retreats, and rites of passage ceremonies.
- As of July 2021, only one of the total participants in the P2R Green Life program has been re-incarcerated after being released from prison. That’s a 3% recidivism rate, compared to a rate of 65% statewide.