Helping people come back into the community more empowered than before.
Tracy’s personal experience through jail and prison allowed her to learn first hand the strong disconnect there is for people re-entering the community and lack of resources there are. Once she finally achieved her own sobriety, she went on to work closely with small groups of women in jail while thinking about how to reach the other 1,400 others who needed this same support and resources. Thanks to the People’s Liberty Haile Fellowship, she was able to create her magazine RISE: Re-Enter Into Society Empowered. This publication’s role is to help people come back into the community more empowered than they came in with information they didn’t know, knowledge they didn’t have, and to help create a plan they could have never created without the paper. Rise is a collection inspiring both hope + help: hope through articles and stories, and help through local resources. After successfully launching throughout Cincinnati, Rise continues to expand to Dayton and plans to launch a juvenile edition.
About the speaker
There’s no better person to tackle the theme of Restart than Tracy. She has overcome heroin addiction, homelessness, incarceration and the inability to find employment that comes as a result. Once in recovery, she decided it was important for her to help people who were going through the same battles that she had experienced.
Tracy began by mentoring women in the jail's heroin recovery pod. It became clear that while Cincinnati had tremendous resources for people trying to pick themselves up out of addiction and incarceration, most people didn't know how to connect to these resources or that they even existed.
That’s where RISE comes in. RISE, which stands for Re-Enter Into Society Empowered, is a monthly newspaper Tracy created to be a resource and inspiration for people trying to get back on their feet. She received a People’s Liberty Haile Fellowship, which gave her the time and funding to bring this idea to life and focus on giving back to her community.
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Roh's Street Cafe (the Sanctuary)
245 W. McMillan Street
Cincinnati, Ohio United States 45219
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