California Reentry and Enrichment (CARE) Grant 2025‑2028 Awards

Program Name: Tighten Up Your B.E.L.T (Basic Emotional Literacy Tools)

The program provides intensive emotional literacy training through interactive workshops and group discussions. The curriculum equips participants with the skills to:

• Understand and manage their emotions effectively.
• Cultivate prosocial intrapersonal communication and subsequent behaviors.
• Develop empathy and improve their interpersonal relationships.
• Constructively process trauma and reduce its negative impact.
• Make informed decisions that support their rehabilitation and reintegration.

Develop, strengthen, or boost reading, writing, comprehension, and public speaking skills.

Program Name: Traditional Arts as Restorative Justice

The program addresses the unique needs of participants at the institutions by providing culturally responsive and trauma-informed programming. The program’s design features five interconnected modules—Traditional Arts Healing and Empathy; Ancestral Knowledge and Narrative Power; Collective Music-Making; Power of Community; and Community Healing. Each module employs traditional arts practices, such as storytelling, music, dance, theater, and visual arts, drawing on shared cultural experiences to foster connection and bridge differences.

Program Name:Prison Arts Initiative

This art program prioritizes healing and the impact of understanding within communities while focusing on diversity, equity, trust, and inclusion. The program equips participants with skills that positively contribute to the creative economy, decrease recidivism, and aid in the process of rehabilitation for a safer community through art modalities including acrylic, mural, oil painting, poetry, creative writing, music (guitar, keyboard, drumming, beat making), tattoo safety classes, bead work, stop motion animation, graphic design, podcasting, poetry in motion, dance, yoga, and theater.

Program Name: Mindful Prisons

The program is designed to provide participants with mindfulness tools and community support for emotional regulation, self-awareness, and personal growth. The curriculum includes practices such as meditation, grounding exercises, emotional regulation, mindful movement, and self-reflection activities. The program emphasizes a secular, inclusive approach to build resilience, compassion, and community cohesion.

Program Name: California State University Project Rebound Outreach Program

The program focuses on understanding the impact of trauma and stressor related disorders, ways to manage and reduce stress, and how to handle anger and conflict. The goals of this enhanced initiative are to 1) provide robust restorative justice victim impact curriculum to participants; 2) provide them with proactive restorative justice practices to enable them to be accountable and understand the impact of the harm caused by the crime; and 3) continue to expose them to an array of educational resources available to them upon release.

Program Name: Get On The Bus (GOTB)

The GOTB program focuses on reuniting children with their incarcerated parents by offering free transportation and vital family reunification services. These services include assisting families with completing detailed paperwork required for institution clearances and coordinating safe, meaningful visits. The program eliminates barriers to contact, normalizes child-parent interactions, and reduces the impacts of stress and trauma on both incarcerated parents and their families.

Program Name: Choices for Life

The Choices for Life program is an alternative educational initiative designed for individuals in adult correctional institutions. Its primary goal is to empower participants to replace harmful behaviors, attitudes, and habits with positive traits such as humility, empathy, and a sense of purpose. The program teaches the practical benefits of shifting focus from a self-centered survival approach to “other-focused” living.

Program Name: Credible Messenger Training

This program is designed to expand an understanding of interconnected societal relationships and gain insights into the way human beings adapt behavior to fit into different environments and form their identity. Additionally, this program confers meaning and value to the lived experience of the participants in a parallel process – while they learn to mentor and coach others, they learn ways to heal themselves.

Program Name: Humane Prison Hospice Project

The program transforms end-of-life care in correctional facilities by training participants as peer caregivers, addressing critical gaps in institutional healthcare. These caregivers are part of a multidisciplinary team and bring empathy and understanding through shared experiences, fostering trust and compassion. The program offers meaningful care for patients and a transformative sense of purpose to the caregiver participants, promoting a culture of dignity and compassion within a challenging system.

Program Name: Trauma Talks Phase II

The program leads peer-to-peer groups designed to educate participants about childhood trauma, guiding them to find resilience, learn tools to help calm their nervous system, reduce aggression and become productive, prosocial members of society upon their return.

Program Name: Virtual Reality

The program curriculum combines a strong and scientifically validated arts-centered program with virtual reality. Participants are exposed to experiences that have been shown to cause anxiety in individuals re-entering society after long term incarceration. Participants build support skills, conflict resolution and social awareness.

Program Name: CEO of Your New Life

The program operates as an entrepreneurship-focused program that prepares participants for successful reentry and business creation. The program equips participants with practical skills through an interactive curriculum, instructor-led courses, peer groups, written assignments, and events with executive volunteers. The structure helps participants envision themselves as CEOs in their new lives while incarcerated, preparing them to become CEOs of their new careers or businesses upon release.

Program Name: FUEL Commutation Workshop

The program provides educational components regarding legal systems processes, as well as content on victim impact and understanding. The program aims to help participants reduce stress and trauma through protective factors, discuss post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in relation to incarceration, mitigate the anxiety associated with the participatory justice processes, and build resilience.

Program Name: Prisoners Uniting People and Puppies (PUPP)

The PUPP program is a dog training program that pairs participants with rescue animals and promotes opportunities for self-growth, skill building to improve self-confidence, self-regulation, reduce recidivism, and provides the opportunity to positively contribute to the community.

Program Name: FTS/Testimony Ministries

This program provides rehabilitation to resolve criminogenic behavior through program curriculum that increases empathy, mindfulness, resilience and results in healing, treating the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and enhancing victim impacts and understanding. The program offers participants an opportunity to build self-confidence, empathy, and increased accountability for their thinking and behavior, as well as develop insight of how their choices related to crime have impacted others.

Program Name: Prison Electronic Music Program

The program provides participants with access to creative, hands-on learning experiences that cultivate self-expression, resilience, and critical life skills. Through the lens of electronic music, participants learn DJing, music production, and business skills while gaining insights into the history of music genres. These disciplines are taught alongside essential emotional and social competencies such as mindfulness, empathy, and conflict resolution.

Program Name: GRIP Program

The program Guiding Rage Into Power (GRIP) is an evidence-based methodology that offers an in-depth journey into the participants’ ability to understand and transform violent behavior and replace it with an attitude of emotional intelligence. The restorative justice program helps participants to comprehend the origins of their violence and develop the skills to track and manage strong impulses before they are acted out in destructive ways. Additionally, it allows participants to develop a deep understanding of the consequences of their actions, thus preventing re-victimization and cultivating authentic empathy for their victims/survivors.

Program Name: Hustle 2.0

Hustle 2.0 is a trauma-responsive, evidence-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) program, covering trauma healing, coping skills, resilience, anger management, violence prevention, and victim awareness.

Program Name: Shelter Dog Program

The program exposes participants to unconditional love from dogs, evoking emotional responses that encourage meaningful rehabilitation. Weekly group assessments process real-world lessons drawn from dog training, fostering accountability, empathy, and conflict resolution.

Program Name: Mens Support Group

Inside Circle empowers participants to confront past trauma and heal. Through the Men’s Support Group, the program curriculum leads participants on a deep, transformational journey of personal growth. The program approach utilizes peer-led healing circles to promote an increase in insight, empathy and accountability..

Program Name: Foundations in the Humanities

The program consists of correspondence courses in literary studies offered through the University of California, Santa Barbara. The program assists individuals in gaining insight into themselves and behaviors that have negatively impacted others so they can become accountable for their past actions. Additionally, the program promotes knowledge about antisocial behaviors.

Program Name: Trauma-Informed Art Workshop – Rooted in Resilience

This program provides trauma-informed art workshops aimed at helping participants heal from trauma. It uses creative expression as a tool to assist in understanding the effects of trauma and abuse on their lives, building healthy coping mechanisms, establishing goals for productive use of their time while incarcerated, and preparing them for successful reentry. Additionally, the program provides a safe and non-intimidating space for participants to express and process painful emotions, cultivate hope and self-worth, and build connections with peers.

Program Name: Circle Keeper Facilitator Training

The program is grounded in trauma-informed and restorative practices which recognizes the diminished culpability of youth who commit crimes before the age of 26 while undergoing critical brain development, affecting impulse control, judgement, and emotional regulation. The benefits of this program are access to pathways for individual healing from trauma, harmful narratives, and unhealthy stress-coping behavior, leading to significant improvements in the participants quality of life and development of meaningful relationships.

Program Name: Land Together

The program offers a mindfulness-based program that provides environmental education, landscape design training, “inner gardening” for personal transformation, and reentry readiness skill-building. As a rehabilitative, restorative program, Land Together creates safer, healthier environments, breaks the cycles of incarceration, and builds pathways for successful reentry. Additionally, this program provides reentry preparation and peer mentorship from staff who were formerly incarcerated.

Program Name: Pathways for Restorative Change (PRC)

This program fosters empathy, accountability, and personal growth, transforming lives and contributing to safer, more constructive correctional environments. This program is a cognitive-behavioral, restorative justice-based program that offers participants practical tools for communication, conflict resolution, and personal development. The curriculum is designed to help participants understand their own behaviors, build on their strengths, and develop key skills in interpersonal problem solving, social awareness, anger management, and values-based decision-making.

Program Name: The Art of Accountability

The program uses transformative justice/circle processes along with techniques that encourage self-reflection and shared problem-solving, participants envision healthy solutions to the problems they face, understand the consequences of their actions, develop the dynamics of communication and conflict resolution, and take responsibility for themselves and their actions.

Program Name: Junior Mentor Program

This program is researched and designed for the unique developmental needs of the Youth Offender Program (YOP) demographic. Participants will embark on a journey of self-discovery coupled with the use of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and other evidence-based, trauma-informed, restorative, and creative modalities. This program aims for increased ability for insight, understanding, empathy, and accountability while addressing incidents of harmful experiences that caused lasting effects and of which may have been sustained through developmental stages.

Program Name: Reentry Prep Programming

This program focuses on developing healthy relationships and understanding how harm impacts the participants and those around them. The program teaches about behaviors that develop as a response to harm, ways to process that harm, and how to modulate their own cognitive responses to effectively change detrimental behavioral patterns in their lives. The program aims to provide critical thinking tools and social skills to ultimately support reentry and reintegration into the community.

Program Name: Expanding Prison Arts Collective

The program works to expand access to the transformative power of the arts through collaboration and mutual learning. It provides arts programming to participants through a holistic approach rooted in liberatory pedagogy, which focuses on learner-centered practices for inclusive learning and empowered classes while integrating principles of restorative justice. It offers a wide range of multidisciplinary arts classes, including visual arts, creative writing, theater, music, and mixed-media workshops which foster connection, encourage personal growth, and inspire transformative experiences within correctional institutions.

Program Name: Success Stories Program

The program consists of current and formerly incarcerated people of all genders supporting each other in recognizing and transforming harmful ideas rooted in patriarchy in gender affinity spaces. This program supports people who have committed patriarchal harm and are likely to continue to commit interpersonal, intimate partner, and community violence by embracing vulnerability, integrity, rebuilding love, and achieving self-accountability.

Program Name: The Apiary Program

This bee keeping program introduces participants to a different facet of caring for others and caring for animals. Participants will work as a member of a team and advance together by sharing knowledge and experience. The team will plan how they approach and maintain their assigned hive.  Participants will be instructed on how to fulfill different jobs during class sessions. Titles including smoker, scraper, frame handler, and stand-by will be rotated weekly. Their flexibility and teamwork skills will be enhanced and evaluated throughout the course

Program Name: Inspiring Transformative Change Program

This program focuses on the needs of those most clearly impacted by trauma and stress, and to overall build resiliency.  The program introduces participants to the effects of trauma (self and community), reenacting trauma, the impact of criminal victimization, trauma theory, child development related to trauma, creating healing, commitment to growth, personal truths, real life application, forgiveness, the power of the individual, connection, clarity, and transformation.

Program Name: Day Retreats

This program provides participants access to various healing modalities, including sound therapy, meditation, journaling, and nervous system education and development. Through these retreats, the goal is to break the cycles of trauma and recidivism, creating a path for individuals to reintegrate into society with resilience, emotional well-being, purpose and tools that can support their bodies, minds, and hearts.

Program Name: Day of Healing

The program is a trauma-informed event that brings survivors from the community together with incarcerated survivors to share and process their experiences of grief, loss, harm, and resilience. This unique program brings a vital and transformative experience to participants who may not be enrolled in rehabilitative programs and can be the beginning of their healing and accountability journey. The program includes deep conversations and healing activities including art and dance, dialogue about loss, grief and accountability, and the humanizing experience of sharing a meal.

Program Name: WISE Program

The Whole Integration of Self Education (WISE) program begins with a deep dive into the cognitive processes and patterns that shape participants’ thoughts and behaviors. The program is designed to address the cognitive inflexibility many participants developed in response to living lives in less-than-ideal environments. This program is geared towards resiliency and rehabilitation for those experiencing lengthy incarceration and life without parole by fueling hope and transformation.

Program Name: THEATRE INSIDE and POETRY IN MOTION

Theatre Inside and Poetry inMotion is an arts focused program that supports rehabilitation using a transformative justice model. Life skills such as stress management through relaxation techniques, improved literacy through writing, and enhanced verbal communication through performance prepares participants for diverse situations post incarceration.

Program Name: Prison Education Project

The program uses university students and faculty volunteers to educate, empower, and transform the lives of participants by collaborating with colleges and providing academic, life skills, and career developing programming. It provides participants with the cognitive tools necessary to function as productive citizens and enhances human development, reduces recidivism, saves resources, and allows participants to ultimately contribute to an economic and civic life.