How employers, mentors, training providers, barbers, and community organizations can help justice-impacted individuals build sustainable careers.
Returning home after incarceration can mean confronting multiple barriers at once. Finding employment, developing new skills, securing transportation, rebuilding relationships, and navigating everyday responsibilities can make establishing economic stability difficult.
A second chance, therefore, requires more than simply identifying a job opening.
It requires connections.
Building a Network Around Opportunity
Communities already contain many of the resources that can help justice-impacted individuals move forward.
Training providers can develop skills. Employers can provide jobs and career pathways. Community organizations can address barriers to employment. Mentors can provide guidance and encouragement. Barbers can use their trusted community relationships to connect people with information, resources, and opportunities.
When these assets operate independently, people can still fall through the gaps. When they are connected, they can create a pathway from reentry to sustainable employment and economic mobility.
The Barber’s Role
Barbers often know their communities and the people they serve personally. That makes them potential trusted connectors.
A barber does not need to become a case manager or reentry specialist. Instead, a barber can help someone discover a training program, learn about an employer willing to provide an opportunity, find a mentor, or connect with an organization equipped to address a specific need.
How ABA Community Helps
ABA Community seeks to strengthen the network surrounding second chances by connecting barbers, employers, training providers, mentors, community organizations, and other partners around pathways to opportunity.
Through workforce and reentry initiatives and the ConnectOne platform, ABA Community can help identify needs, match individuals with relevant resources and opportunities, facilitate connections, and support continued engagement.
The objective is not simply placement into the first available job.
It is helping create a connected pathway toward skills, employment, career advancement, entrepreneurship, and long-term economic stability.