At our Reentry Organizing Center, we work to engage and empower all individuals returning home from prison.  Our reentry counselors walk with people through the difficult process of finding housing, obtaining employment and reuniting with their families.  Our teaching staff coordinate skills-building and educational programs to assist participants in realizing their goals and dreams.  We also host meetings for area prison justice organizations, so that all at our center can connect with activist work that helps them build the futures they want to live.

In addition to this programming at our Center, we also support three core projects:

• TEACH Inside/TEACH Outside – A 2005 study by Rucker Johnson and Steven Raphael found that the link among prisons, race and HIV is so strong that it almost entirely explains the disproportionate impact of HIV in the Black community.  The founding vision of TEACH Inside/TEACH Outside is that we can change this.  TEACH Inside/TEACH Outside is an empowerment and mutual support intervention designed not only to reduce individuals’ risk of contracting HIV, but also to transform the structures that increase community-level HIV vulnerability.
• Support Center for Prison Advocacy – United around the slogan ‘Community Organizing is a Reentry Program,’ the Support Center for Prison Advocacy  was founded to reduce HIV vulnerability by building the leadership of people who are formerly imprisoned and their families in organizing their own neighborhood communities.  With efforts already underway in North, South and West Philadelphia, the Support Center for Prison Advocacy aims to create a city-wide resource center without walls.
• Prison Health News – Founded in 2001, Prison Health News is a quarterly newsletter written by and for people who have been in prison or are currently living behind the walls.  Spanning topics on medical updates, health care advocacy tips and mutual support, Prison Health News works to build community across the prison walls that divide us.  Prison Health News is a project of Reaching Out: A Support Group with Action and the Institute for Community Justice.  Each issue is produced by a Philadelphia-based collective of writers and editors, most of whom have been in prison and are living with HIV, and includes the work of imprisoned artists and writers.