Innovative Programming Grant (IPG) 2025‑2028 Awards

Program Name: The Reentry Blueprint

The Reentry Blueprint is a transformative program balancing restorative justice with comprehensive reentry preparation. The Reentry Blueprint recognizes that lasting transformation requires equal emphasis on accountability, healing, and practical preparation for life after incarceration. The program goes beyond traditional programming through a meticulously designed 11-week curriculum that sequences two essential components. The first phase focuses on transforming mindsets through restorative justice, using trauma-informed individual counseling and group work. The second phase then builds on this foundation with hands-on skill development, helping participants create comprehensive, personalized reentry plans that serve as actionable blueprints for their future.

Program Name: Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment, Health (PERMAH)

The programs evidence-based PERMAH framework serves both veteran and civilian populations within CDCR institutions to leverage veteran peer support dynamics while addressing service-connected needs. The program provides emotional awareness and regulation, engagement techniques, building healthy connections and communication skills, exploring purpose and values, setting and achieving goals, and developing holistic wellness practices for military-civilian understanding, shared accountability, and enhanced group dynamics.

Program Name: Exploring Trauma Plus (ET+)

The ET+ trauma program is insight-oriented and focuses on an understanding of trauma, its process, and its impact on both the inner self (thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and values) and the outer self (behavior and relationships). The program includes the lived realities of gender-diverse populations. For bonding and building acceptance, groups are meant to be combined and not specific to gender identity. The program uses a variety of insight-oriented therapeutic approaches (e.g., expressive arts, mindfulness, yoga, and guided imagery) to address the principles of Restorative Justice and promote increased insight regarding the cycle of victimization and perpetration.

Program Name: Insight Prison Project VOEG Program

The program focuses on trauma-informed and restorative justice principles by emphasizing insight, personal responsibility, and the repair of relationships harmed by crime through self-discovery. Participants address the root causes of criminal behavior by examining their past traumas, recognizing the impact of their actions, and developing tools to prevent relapse into harmful behaviors. Participants will obtain the skills necessary to demonstrate an understanding of restorative justice principles including analyzing causative factors that led to harming behavior, managing an action plan to facilitate nonviolent behaviors, and the ability to respond to external circumstances and individuals.

Program Name: ONE WAY Curriculum

The program empowers participants to take responsibility for their actions and begin personal transformation. Grounded in Biblical teachings and cognitive principles, it emphasizes mindful decision-making and accountability. Through reflective writing and self-examination, participants gain insight into the impact of their choices, and develop empathy and growth. Aligned with restorative justice, the program encourages amending past wrongs, restoring relationships, and engaging in acts of service during incarceration. The ultimate goal is to cultivate a mindset of service that extends beyond release, enabling participants to positively impact their communities and rebuild their lives with integrity. The long-term aim is to create lasting change by empowering participants to transform their own lives and make a meaningful impact on others.

Program Name: Insight Garden Program

The program offers a 48-week mindfulness-based program that provides environmental education, landscape design training, “inner gardening” for personal transformation, and re-entry readiness skill-building. Land Together (LT) provides programming to diverse participants including women, people who are transgender/gender non-conforming, LGBTQAI+, Enhanced Outpatient Program (EOP), Sensitive Needs Yards (SNY), Youth Offender Population (YOP), people with physical, mental, and developmental disabilities, and more. Further, LT provides reentry preparation and peer mentorship from staff who were formerly incarcerated. LT focuses on insight-oriented restorative justice and accountability principles by reflective dialogues and small group work in gardens and the classrooms to bridge divides across race, class, gender, ability, and more.

Program Name: Anger Management

The Anger Management program is an insight-oriented, somatic healing program that provides participants with a curriculum that teaches emotional intelligence and addresses topics such as anger & childhood experiences, re-parenting the inner child, mapping messages around gender & anger, anger & intergenerational trauma, facing anger, building tools for non-violent communication, and empowering narratives. Participants engage in daily exercises, check-ins, drama and theatre games, role playing, writing exercises, and group participation.

Program Name: Shakespeare

The Shakespeare program encourages self-reflection, teaches acting/life skills, requires teamwork and trust, and encourages appreciation for self and others. Participants gain emotional awareness, an understanding of human motivation, the ability to make choices, face obstacles, identify positive tactics, and celebrate successes. Utilizing the skills obtained, the participants perform a play – either a modified Shakespeare play or original writing by participants inspired by themes in Shakespeare.

Program Name: The Pawsitive Change (PC) Program

The program provides healing and rehabilitation through a therapeutic environment where Student Trainers learn to care for and train at-risk shelter dogs which helps participants with developing empathy, responsibility and emotional regulation. The PC 14-week curriculum provides participants with an understanding of dog training, dog psychology and the impact of one’s energy on dogs and people around them. To promote community building, Program Trainers assign teams of care groups to each dog. Student Trainers must work cooperatively with their group to implement a care and training schedule. Program Trainers focus on skill development by providing dog training techniques and tools as well as emphasizing self-reflection and coping skills to deal with anger, frustration, fear and anxiety while developing accountability and the ability to engage in honest self-reflection and to understand the impact of their actions on others.

Program Name: Reflecting Shakespeare

The program utilizes Teaching Artists (TAs) to guide participants through a scaffolded, supportive curriculum that fosters well-being, mindfulness, personal responsibility and essential social skills. Each session begins with co-creating group agreements, followed by a check-in where participants share their highs and lows, and practice mindful breathing techniques. Activities focus on building connection and emotional intelligence through intentional play. Participants explore scene scripts, discussing themes like redemption and responsibility, and reflect on how those themes resonate with their own lives. Participants create poetry and prose, sharing their work to build confidence and trust. The class collaborates on an original play combining Shakespeare’s text and their own writing, culminating in a final public performance that showcases their collective growth and empowers each individual.

Program Name: Critical Insight

The program is a restorative justice and responsibility focused program, blending personal and professional development with the goal of economic security upon reentry. Through one-on-one mentorship and group cohort settings, participants gain empathy, accountability, and healing skills while developing concrete reentry plans. The program blends job-skills with restorative justice and healing, recognizing that economic security is only one piece of reentry. The program provides hard skills like interviewing, budgeting, and how to secure/maintain housing. Programming also includes sessions on restorative justice, working with victim surrogates who share their stories and provide a safe space for reflection and repair.

Program Name: PFL Shelter Program

The program facilitates opportunities for participants to work with dogs, incentivizing attitudes, behaviors, and lifestyles conducive to building personal responsibility, self-control, and empathy. Program participants gain knowledge, skills, job training, and positive values. The ultimate goal is to provide the transformative change necessary for successful reentry back into the community and the resources to help reduce the likelihood of recidivism. The PFL Shelter program is an intensive hands-on rehabilitative program that transforms the lives of participants and dogs.

Program Name: Prison of Peace

The program focuses on restorative justice and victim needs. Participants learn to conduct interest-based mediation as an alternative to violence when dealing with conflict. Through Prison of Peace, participants learn to see themselves, their behavior, and others differently, developing empathy. Participants practice their new skills with their peers and experience positive changes in peer relationships. Through the introduction of restorative justice principles and learning about emotions, participants internalize the impact of their crimes/behaviors and understand accountability, improving their rehabilitative outcomes for themselves and others.

Program Name: Prison Yoga + Meditation

Prison Yoga + Meditation offers participants mind-clearing journeys of trauma-informed yoga and meditation to better cope with Post Incarceration Syndrome and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Certified instructors guide participants beyond their trauma to foster healing, resilience, impulse, and anger control. The program teaches participants how to gain agency over their trauma so that they can pursue and achieve the full expression of their lives. The workshop educates participants on self-love and self-compassion through exercises that teach participants how to be mindful and connected to others, which leads to more stable feelings of self-worth and resilience.

Program Name: Yoga and Mindfulness Immersion

Prison Yoga Project’s (PYP) “Yoga and Mindfulness Immersion Program” (YMIP) provides trauma-informed, evidence-based programming tailored to the complex needs of incarcerated individuals. The program emphasizes embodied mindfulness and breathing practices to improve emotional regulation, build resilience, and address PTSD symptoms. It fosters empathy, compassion, and accountability, helping participants understand victim impact and align with restorative justice principles. In addition to underlining trauma-informed yoga, embodied mindfulness and breathing practices, YMIP integrates psychoeducation on the neurobiology of stress and trauma, and guided self-reflection exercises. It offers a healthy recreational outlet, enhancing physical fitness, alleviating chronic pain, and reducing stress-related disorders. By cultivating mindfulness and resilience, it reduces aggression and hostility while promoting prosocial attitudes and behaviors.

Program Name: The Art of Accountability

Red Ladder Theatre Company works with a wide range of marginalized and disenfranchised populations within the community, using the tools and techniques of improvisational and devised theatre to help participants develop positive life-skills. The Art of Accountability 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: Sanctuary

The Sanctuary program provides a comprehensive curriculum focused on exploring the impact of harm and encourages insight, accountability, and healing through creativity. Participants create a healing “Sanctuary,” incorporating reflective and expressive elements in tandem with curriculum modules that emphasize creative expression as well as other restorative approaches to delve into harm. Participants identify insight into childhood experiences, trauma, gender socialization, healthy vs. traumatic relationships, the shame/criminality connection, causes and effects of violence, and accountability for harm caused.

Program Name: Foundations in the Humanities

The program promotes knowledge about antisocial behaviors. The literary works participants read are case studies of individual transformation. The beginning of each story presents a character facing a challenge; the middle represents how the character addresses the challenge; and the conclusion shows how the character resolves the challenge. Further, the works of literature included in the program are written from a particular narrative viewpoint that affords insight into the main character’s motives, thereby encouraging the reader to evaluate the character’s decisions as they move through the beginning-middle-end of the narrative. Participants engage in a one-on-one exchange of ideas with a mentor through a structured format of essay writing and response that enables participants to experience themselves as valued thinkers. This builds self-esteem and enables participants to reconnect to their humanity.

Program Name: Roadmap to Reentry (R2R)

The program is designed to empower participants to navigate barriers to reentry effectively and with confidence. Participants learn how to address legal and practical challenges in areas such as employment, housing, and family unity. Each participant leaves the program with a step-by-step action plan designed to increase their chances of reentry success and reduce the risk of recidivism. This process fosters responsibility, self-confidence and hope, creating a more positive environment and encouraging participants to take on leadership roles. By preparing individuals to become role models and mentors, the program also promotes a culture of empowerment and collaboration among participants.

Program Name: Prison Arts Collective (Pac): Curatorial Workshop

The program offers in-depth lessons in curating art, publishing creative work, and organizing gallery shows or artistic installations. The Creative Curatorial Lab bridges the gap between foundational training and advanced professional development, equipping participants with skills to refine their creative vision, develop exhibitions, and share their work meaningfully. Rooted in PAC’s model of scholarly and experiential learning, the program culminates in practical outcomes, including a proposal of a curated exhibition and the submission of published works with the permission of the correctional facility. The Creative Curatorial Lab addresses a distinct need for advanced opportunities among participants who have grown as artists and peer leaders but seek pathways to elevate their creative practice. This workshop provides participants with knowledge not only to create the exhibition in the workshop, but that they can apply to their own art in learning about titles, archives, portfolios, and a professional writing style to present their work.

Program Name: Prison Arts Collective: Shared Horizons (Murals)

The program provides a structured, inclusive, and empowering artistic experience. Designed to foster self-expression, collaboration, and confidence, the program offers participants the chance to contribute meaningfully to their institutional environment. The murals created during the program will serve as lasting reminders of the participants’ creativity and shared vision, visually enhancing the carceral space while fostering connection and dialogue. Participants will explore the creative process of mural-making through brainstorming, collaborative design, and hands-on painting, culminating in the installation of impactful murals at each site. These murals will reflect the unique needs, concerns, and aspirations of the participants, while fostering teamwork, community building, and self-expression.

Program Name: Holistic Wellness Program

The program enhances the holistic wellness approach by further integrating insight-oriented techniques, individual responsibility, and restorative justice principles into the foundational program model. This expanded curriculum will emphasize participants’ ability to understand their own cognitive and emotional processes, take ownership of their choices, and develop empathy toward victims and the broader community. Participants are provided with the foundations of anger & insight-oriented reflection, restorative justice & accountability modules, holistic wellness tools (breathwork, mindfulness, and stress management), and reentry planning (financial literacy, employment readiness, and community resource mapping).

Program Name: SAGE Program

The program is rooted in insight-oriented principles, with a strong emphasis on participants taking responsibility for their actions and engaging in restorative justice practices. Participants learn the core concepts of self/safety, accountability, grief, and empathy while exploring how each of those factors influences self-awareness and the impact to survivors of harm. Participants develop the necessary tools to understand and process their trauma, take accountability, and foster empathy.

Program Name: Community Healing Through Amends

The program is designed to provoke deep introspection into how participants can accept and express accountability for their past harmful actions and promote community healing through empathy and insight. The program provides participants the ability to identify the impact of criminal acts, both immediate and long term, on victims, family, community and the larger society, including tertiary victimizations that are not often discussed or explored. Beginning with an in-depth study of the tenets of restorative justice and how those principles differ from traditional justice and processes, the course progresses through identifying categories and cohorts who can be damaged by violence and other criminal acts. The wide scope of victims is explored (direct, indirect and secondary victims), as are methods for participants to accept responsibility for their actions and make amends to both victims and community.