Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast. The podcast of Pomona Collage. I'm Patty vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Mark Wood. Patty Vest: In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes. As we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sage cast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: This episode was recorded on April 3rd, 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we release this episode, many cities across the US are grappling with issues of racial injustice, exacerbated but the death of George Floyd. Today we're talking with Andrew Glazer, class of 97, the national president and CEO of Defy Ventures, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people in our, or just out of prison, prepare for successful lives on the outside. Mark Wood: Welcome Andrew. It's good to have you with us. You've said that during your early years, the LA riots in 1992 were a seminal moment in your life, how old were you and why was that so important? Andrew Glazier: Yeah. So, I was just about 16. So I was a junior in high school, I'm pretty sure. I think up until that moment, LA is one of these cities where you can spend your whole life really in a bubble, and I think for me, that was a no exception. I went to a private school. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, other than occasionally heading out for music lessons in downtown LA, I really had no reason to be there. So it was very possible to grow up in this bubble where there was this sort of other group of people, other parts of the city that I didn't know about, I never went to and really felt like I had nothing to do with me. Andrew Glazier: The riots happened and all of a sudden there was this moment of, "This is my city, this is where I live. This is happening here. And I can't just pretend like I have my life and that's somebody else's life." I don't think I knew it at the time, but I think processing my experience of the riots over the course of the next few years, really kind of drove home for me this larger community that I was living in, and that there were real injustices and disparities in the world. All was not what it seemed in the halls of my private school. Patty Vest: Andrew, tell us about your Pomona years. How did they help shape your life going forward? Andrew Glazier: Yeah, yeah. So, Pomona was some of the best years of my life. I really, really enjoyed my time there. For me, it was the first time I think in my life that I arrive in a place where I felt like I was among my people. So, it was really a great place for me to learn and grow and build relationships. It's also where I continued to explore my own hopes and dreams for what I wanted to be and to be able to kind of try out new stuff. I think I had done photography in high school for the yearbook and initially came out of Pomona doing photography for the newspaper and then transitioned to become a writer. Andrew Glazier: That was a great experience to actually start reporting on things and then I gave myself a column in my senior year, because you could do that. Also my roommate was the editor in chief. Mark Wood: Oh that helps. Patty Vest: Well connected. Andrew Glazier: Yeah. So it was like, "Hey, how about a column?" And he's like, "Okay, how about a column." So. Patty Vest: What did you write about? Andrew Glazier: Well, so my column was called the answer man, and I would make up questions to ask myself and answer. Patty Vest: Dear Andrew. Andrew Glazier: Yes. So, it was more of along the lines of... I'm glad you asked that even though I know they've asked me that. I mean I had a lot of fun with it. I'm sure it was a little bit obnoxious, but I feel like that's kind of Collage. So doing all those things, I think I started to experience different ways of being active. I got to kind of curve up with my own brand of what I felt that was like to be an advocate for something or whether that was writing behind the scenes about something or having opinions about things. Andrew Glazier: It was all part of the experience and I think Pomona also offered... It was a more diverse environment than I had been in before that. And so I'm not sure how Pomona rated on a diversity scale in the mid 90s, but certainly for me, it was more diverse than where I come from. And there was a lot of diversity of thought and opinion and that was great. Mark Wood: I think early on you said that you had plans after Pomona at some point to run for office. Are those plans on hold or have you left them behind? Andrew Glazier: Yeah, so I think I had a lot of ambition coming out of Pomona. I think when I graduated, I was determined to run for the mayoralty of Los Angeles. I was already plotting my ascend to that post. But, coming out of school, well, first I taught English in Japan on the JET program, and then came back and had my five-year plans kind of laid out. Part of that was I went and worked for an elected official. I worked for a few actually. One for the state controller, and then for a school board member, which was a great experience. Andrew Glazier: And I have to say working in government to me is something I think everyone should do. Because it gives you this window into our democracy, that I think it can be very hard to appreciate how government happens, when you're sort of sitting as an observer of that or experiencing it or on the receiving end of that. But being in the middle of it, it was a great experience. It also slowly but surely cured me of the desire to be an elected official. Andrew Glazier: I think you really have to want to do it, you have to do for the right reasons I think. There's a lot of people in politics who run for office and it may start in the right place, but then slowly kind of moves into this kind of desire for power and influence, those can be some of the corrupting aspects of government. But for me, I think in the end I just realized that wasn't going to be my path. And that's fine. So, unless I'm appointed US Senator, by some governor in the future, I don't see elected office in my future. Patty Vest: Definitely not. Mark Wood: So, what's your path? What path did you choose? Andrew Glazier: So, having been in government about five years, I think one of the things I realized was, that I had a great grounding in the liberal arts courtesy Pomona, critical thinking, good writing. But then I was missing some of the harder skills, that I felt would make me better at whatever it is I was going to do. And so, specifically I remember we were, at that time I was working at a unified school district, we were reviewing a lot of, we had a big giant bond program. It's one of the largest bond programs in the country at the time. Andrew Glazier: And I remember these, these guys would come in from the business consultants and they would sort of lay out these timelines and all these financials and I'd be looking at budgets and I just was totally lost. And it's like, "This is something I need to understand better." And so that plus a desire to make millions in real estate took me to business school. So, I went to get my MBA at UCLA Anderson school really with the goal of becoming a real estate developer. That was very interesting too. Andrew Glazier: I don't know that I enjoyed it all that much. But I certainly learned some good stuff. And one thing I did not learn was how to manage. I did learn though a lot about finance and strategy and operations and some useful stuff, but mostly it teaches you a different way of thinking about risk and return. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: And that has served me really well on everything I've done. But I finished business school in 06 and then did go into real estate development for a few years. And for those of you who may remember, 06 to 08 had some echoes of today, from an economic standpoint I joined as the markets were just hitting their peak and then headed into the toilet. But in the interim, I was in a little real estate development company, a little entrepreneurial firm, and I started originally ostensibly to do finance and was spread sheeting and creating models. Andrew Glazier: There wasn't really anything to buy or sell. So then there was a project. So I ended up as a general contractor. So, the guys at the firm are like, "Hey, listen, you seem kind of handy. Why don't you run the construction site?" It was their first project too. They didn't know the right end of a hammer. And I did. I had some construction in my blood. It was like, "Okay, yeah. I'll give that a shot." Little did I know that that meant I was going to spend the next 18 months running a construction site. Andrew Glazier: So I taught myself general contracting on the fly there, and it was stressful. It was a challenging project. But that's where I learned to manage, because you have all of these different crews coming on from all these different places, and you had to manage to a goal. That was great practice. You're managing to a timeline, to a budget and to a quality standard. And as I learned in construction, you can have two of those three things. But not all three. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: So, we came in on time and over budget, but with good quality. So those are the few we picked or that I picked. But along the way, I really learned a lot about just managing and managing people. In one of my favorite parts was walking around and just talking to the various crews and learning about them. I had a concrete crew that they were all from the same small town in Oaxaca. And I had a framing crew that was all from the same town in Guatemala. I had an electric crew that was from Vietnam. It was great to walk around and meet people and talk to people. Andrew Glazier: And then I also met people who were formerly incarcerated. In talking to them, I mean, I remember this one guy and he was on one of my framing crews. And he was like, "Yeah when I was a meth addict and was robbing a store, and I ran from a cop and stole his gun and then I got shot. And then I went to prison for a couple of years, and now here I am doing this." And he's like, "And I'm thankful for this." Hearing him talk about his life and kind of how he got there, he also made the point of like, "Listen, there just aren't a lot of options. This is what was open to me. I didn't wake up, when I was 10 years old and say to myself I want to be a framer, but that's what I'm doing. I'm happy to be doing it. But that's how I got here." Andrew Glazier: And that was the first time in my life that I had talked to somebody that I knew had a criminal history. And heard their story. And had just a human interaction. He was super nice guy and he was doing his thing. And I met a few other people there who also criminal histories and that's really where I realized look, reentry is really hard coming out of prison. Particularly if you're coming out with a violent felony, your options are really limited. And this was in the mid 2000s. When the conversation at that point was still just coming off of how to keep people away for longer, right? Andrew Glazier: I mean, if you think about criminal justice as a movement in the late 90s, all anybody want to talk about was super predators and giving people more time, right. How do you keep people in jail for longer, right. Where [inaudible 00:15:01] strikes and minimum sentencing and mandatory sentencing. So at that point, there wasn't a lot going on. But that stuck with me. So, I left construction to the way because the market really had fallen apart. There was nothing to do. I spent about eight months of introspection, also known as unemployment, while I was trying to think through my next move. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: Because I was underemployed, did some kind of odd jobs here and there. And then my wife finally said I had to get a job. So I ended up taking a job with a nonprofit called City Year. And it was an education based nonprofit. And for me at that point, it really felt like a step backwards to me, because I had gone to business school to be in the private sector to not be in government, not go back to education, yet here I was, and it felt like when the economy was bad, all anybody looked for on your resume was what they were definitely sure you could do, right? Mark Wood: Right. Andrew Glazier: What my resume said I could definitely do was work with government and work in education. City Year came along and I knew the leader of the LA site. She said, "Well, we need some help with the school district." And at first I was like, "I don't want to do that." But then my wife is like, "You should go do that." So, I took that job and it was for a six month contract to really help them sort out their work with LA unified. It was an education based nonprofit doing a lot of work in schools. One of the things you quickly realize when you do have government experience, is that government is a black box to people and that it's this mysterious thing that you don't understand. Andrew Glazier: And so if you do understand it, you can help pretty easily. And so when I talked to them, they said, "We need this and this." And I said, listen, "That's not what you need. I know what you need, and I can do it for you. So, I'll do it for six months." So I came in and did it for six months, Did a good job. They're happy. And like, "Well, why don't you stay?" It's like, "Yeah, but I don't want to just keep doing that." So then they made me something else. Oh, then I became a chief of staff. Then I started. Got into the program and then six months later... A year later, I was running the whole program. And so I ended up six months turned into eight years, and I stayed there for almost eight years. Andrew Glazier: What that taught me is something that I think actually is starting to become relevant now to a lot of people. I think it's always relevant, particularly relevant now, which is, "Look when you're looking around and trying to figure out what to do..." I had to be open to what the universe offered to me at that time. And I took me a little while to realize like, "This is what the universe is offering to me right now. So, all right. Let's see what happens." It was the beginning of kind of an accidental series of career moves for me that eventually brought me to Defy. Andrew Glazier: So, eight years there, really immersed in public education and all that goes along with that, but also seeing this school to prison pipeline and how generational poverty and violence and racism and inequity really is part of this pathway, that kids who grow up in the inner city, for a lot of them, if your grandmother was in the gang and your father's in the gang, it's the path of least resistance in a lot of cases. Mark Wood: Yeah. Andrew Glazier: And absence of intervention, absent and opportunity, right? Mark Wood: Yeah. Andrew Glazier: You need to see it, and at City Year, we would try all these interventions. We were successful a lot of times, but then there were the kids who we weren't successful with. So, eventually I made the decision to leave City Year and that was really more about having just felt like I had done what I was there to do, and my work was done there and I was looking for a new challenge. So, I left and I gave them six months notice that, "Hey, listen, I'm ready to do something different." I wanted to also have a shot at being in charge of something, being the number one, I've been the number two there for a long time. Andrew Glazier: And I was good at that, but I wanted to try something new. So I left and didn't know where I was going to go. I was lucky enough to be able to leave without another job lined up. Three months later to Defy Ventures came calling and I got put in touch with them through a mutual contact and they said, "Well, what do you think?" And I took a look and said, "Okay, yeah. I'll give this a shot. This certainly rings true for me as an interesting extension of the work I was doing at City Year, sort of a new spot in that cycle." Right? Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: And also thinking back to my experience on that construction site all those years ago, it felt like the right thing. So, I took the job as the executive director for Southern California, for Defy Ventures, which at that point, was a new chapter. And then things kind of took off from there. Patty Vest: So, what did Defy do? What was the kind of work that Defy did? What did Defy look like at that point? Walk us through how you became president of Defy, and there are some difficult conditions. Andrew Glazier: Yeah. Yeah. So, Defy is an entrepreneurship program. But really what Defy is about, is giving people with criminal histories their best shot at a second chance. And we use entrepreneurship as a lever there, to increase economic opportunity and to change mindsets. Because, it turns out that entrepreneurship is a very, very powerful context for mindset change. I've never met anybody who was a successful entrepreneur who didn't believe they could do something. Andrew Glazier: You can't be an entrepreneur, if you don't believe you have something to offer the world. That you don't believe that you have gifts to give or something to sell. And that's what we call a growth mindset, oh, sorry, it's what we call an asset based mindset. Growth mindset is important too, but the asset based mindset is the really important piece of this year, because you have to believe in yourself. You have to believe you can do something. And so, we use entrepreneurship as this way to transform a liability based mindset to an asset based mindset. Andrew Glazier: So, that's what the program fundamentally does. Entrepreneurship sits at the center of it, but really 75% of the curriculum is personal development and career readiness. But you can pull people in with this idea of entrepreneurship. So, Defy works in prisons and also in the post release space. So we work with people while they're still incarcerated and then after they come out, using entrepreneurship as a center, but really with the goal of changing the mindset to better prepare them for reentry, so that when they leave prison, they come into society, they're in a mindset that will allow them to be successful, whether they choose to start their own business or not is not really important. Andrew Glazier: But, what we see and what we know is that, if you have that asset based mindset, you're going to have a far better shot at getting a job. If you can talk about your past and you have optimism and goals for your future. So, that's what we do. So when I came into to Defy, we were still about a seven year old organization in five States. Southern California was really new, operating I think in three or four prisons at that point. The local chapter was kind of a mess. The organization was run by people who were, they were entrepreneurs themselves, didn't really have a lot of experience in nonprofit management, we're kind of learning things on the fly. I made a lot of mistakes. Andrew Glazier: So, I had an experience set there that was useful because I had come from a very large, well established nonprofit, I knew what it was supposed to look like. So, I was able to kind of organize the Southern California chapter. And then after five months, the CEO and founder said to me, "Well, why don't you move into the chief program officer role and help us organize the rest of the chapters in the country on a national level." So I did that. Andrew Glazier: And then a few months after that we had a massive scandal involving the founder and CEO, driven by a disgruntled employee who shared a lot of confidential information out in the world and also made a lot of stuff up. But it didn't really matter. In the end, there was enough there that was true, that the founder had to resign. That plus some pretty nasty press led to, well, me getting a battlefield promotion to become president and CEO but also a complete ceasing up of our funding pipeline. Andrew Glazier: So here I was with a sudden promotion to be CEO. So you remember, I had left City Year with the goal of becoming a number one somewhere. Little did I know I was going to get what I was asking for- Patty Vest: Mission accomplished. Andrew Glazier: ... in this way. But be careful what you wish for. So, there I was in charge of this organization that was effectively a ship on fire or a dumpster fire in this case and terrified, right. Because like, "This was not what I planned for, not what my experience set, I felt I prepared me for." Mark Wood: It's not something you want to put on your resume. Oversaw the final decline of an institution, right? Andrew Glazier: That's right. Exactly. Yes. Rode organization into this. So, there I was doing the best I could without a lot of guidance. Again, teaching myself how to do something along the way. The end result was I became president and initially interim CEO, just about actually almost two years exactly from now ago. And then a month later or a few weeks later suddenly realized I should be asking how much money we had, and then found out we had no money. Andrew Glazier: The result of that was unfortunately I had to lay off two thirds of the staff nationally over video call, which was really one of the worst days of my professional life. I had to figure out how to rebuild this thing. Mark Wood: How do you go about rebuilding something like that? I mean, that kind of downward momentum is really hard to turn, isn't it? Andrew Glazier: It is nearly impossible and effectively we flat lined. So, we hit a day in May, I think it was May 5th of 2018 when I laid everybody off and just, "Hey, we're closing." Patty Vest: And? Andrew Glazier: So then the board came to me and they said, listen, "If you'll try to give it a go, we'll give you a quarter of a million dollars to try to figure it out." And so they dug into their pockets, came with a quarter million dollars, and then I was able to kind of restart the organization with five people. Mark Wood: How many had there been before? Andrew Glazier: 60. Mark Wood: 60. Yeah. So. Yeah. Andrew Glazier: Yeah. We were a year prior, a $7.1 million budget. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Andrew Glazier: With roughly 60 people, and now we were five, six people. And then I started making calls and begging people to help us. I found there were a few people out there who felt this was too important not to do. That the work that we did was good and that it shouldn't die. And so little by little, I was able to cobble together, for somebody came through with 100,000 and then somebody came through with 20 and then 40. And then I had lots of worth 500 bucks, $1,000 and slowly but surely we were able to turn the lights back on, but also I had to create a new business model. Andrew Glazier: Essentially create a business model on back of a napkin, evolved over the course of the next year, but involves sort of franchising the program out. And then just had to settle threatened lawsuits and then deal with a lot of anger and emotion out there from people, whether it was former employees or former donors, it was just was a lot of work. Andrew Glazier: Within all that, I also had to figure out why I was there. And that was the hardest thing, because I think there were a number of months there, where every day I would go to work and feel stuck. I'd feel like I had no choice, but to be there. Because if I didn't do it, then it was on me. And if it failed then I was letting all these people down, but it was awful. Right. I hated every day I went to work. Because, it just felt like I was there cause I had no choice. Andrew Glazier: And then I met this guy who was an executive coach. We were still running these prison trips because our goal was just to try to finish the programs that we had started, so that we weren't going to let these men and women die while inside prison. So, the goal is just finish them out and then close up. Right? Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: And I met this guy, met him in prison. Never gets old to say that. And he said, "You know what? I'm an executive coach and I'm going to coach you." And first I was like, "If I had a dollar for everybody who offered to coach me right now, I could fund my organization." But he's like, "No, no, we're going to do this." The first time I got on the phone with him, he said, "Listen, why are you here?" Said, "Well, this moral obligation, I feel like it's this ethical obligation to do this. And there's all these people." And he's, "No, no. Why are you here?" It's like, "Well, I also hate losing." He's like, "That part I believe." Andrew Glazier: And he's like, "Listen, you can quit anytime you want to. Nobody's making you do this. But you have to find a reason to show up and the other piece of this is, if you stand up in front of people and you say, Hey, listen, help me die. Give me money so I can die, as an organization. That is not inspiring at all to anybody. Nobody wants to fund that." Mark Wood: Oh, it inspires me. Yeah, no. Andrew Glazier: He says, "Look, got to lead with optimism and gratitude and confidence." Mark Wood: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: "And you got to believe that there's something that you can do." It's like, "Okay. Yeah, you're right." And the other thing he said to me, I said, "It's possible. Well, but I'm not sure. What if it doesn't work? Then I've lied to all these people." It's like, "No, listen, your integrity, that's not your problem here. Right? I mean the prior leadership in the organization that had, might've been a problem. That was not my problem." Andrew Glazier: It's like, "Look, nobody thinks you're trying to sell a bill of goods. All you have to do is have a plan that's legitimate. You're taking the money and going to Hawaii. You have a legitimate plan and you have a legitimate path to get there. As long as you have that, your integrity is intact. If it fails, it fails. But everybody knows or should know that things go wrong. You can try as hard as you can, but sometimes it doesn't work out. So you should just assume that people know that. And you don't need to tell them that. They know. What you need to say is, here's what I'm trying to do. And here's what I think I can get there and why, I think I'm the guy to do this. And then people will support you." Andrew Glazier: And so, at a flip switched for me in that moment, where I was able to say to myself, "You know what? I am here because I want to be here. I have urgency." And I used to give this piece of advice to the AmeriCorps members at City Year when I was there, and I had 300 AmeriCorps members work for me, I would say to them, "One, you're doing City Year, it's not being done to you. And two, if it doesn't hurt, you're not growing." So, I had to eat my own words at that point and tell myself, "You know what? I am doing this job. It's not being done to me. If it doesn't hurt, I'm not growing. And I am here because I want to be here. And if it doesn't work out, I'm not a bad person." Mark Wood: Yeah. Andrew Glazier: And that completely changed the way that I thought about work and told my entire mindset about doing the job. And these days, I'm going to say it's about 80, 20. 80% of the time I think I can do it and 20% of the time I feel like it's never going to work, right? Those are pretty good odds. I think for the last three weeks, maybe those odds are changing a little bit, but certainly look, I mean getting in the mindset, transform my own mindset in this place of like, "This is something that I can do, and we have assets here and we're doing something important and good." That was as much of the success of turning around the organization as anything. Mark Wood: And talk to us about what Defy Ventures are actually does. Andrew Glazier: Yeah. Mark Wood: How do you choose your participants and how does it work? Andrew Glazier: Yeah, so we work in mostly moderate and maximum security prisons. There's a few minimum security. They're with men and women and where we work with young adults down at age 18. We'll accept anybody into the program who fills out the application and says that they want to do it. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: We have a recruitment meeting in prison, where one of us goes in often meets, sometimes others. And we kind of go through the program and we talk about what it is. We make sure they understand like, "Look, there's a lot of self work going into this. Yes, entrepreneurship is it. Yes, you're going to learn about starting your own business, but here's the thing, you're also going to learn a lot about yourself. You're going to spend a lot of time working on yourself." Andrew Glazier: It's about a seven month program. It's not easy. It's about 1200 pages of curriculum, 10 to 15 hours of work per week. They meet between one and three times a week and in a group. And then we bring volunteers in, as coaches and mentors halfway through and at the very end. And so at midpoint, we bring in a group of anywhere from 20 to 50 volunteers who come in as coaches and they coach them around their resumes and their personal statements and their business plan. Andrew Glazier: And then at the very end, we bring in volunteers for a business pitch competition in prison. It's kind of shark tank style where we do rounds of pitches and then we pick five winners at the end. And the winners get between one and $500 depending on how they place, first to fifth place. And they can get that money as an IOU when they release. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: But the curriculum, it's about 25% of true hard entrepreneurship, like costs and revenues and marketing and things like that. And the rest of it is personal development, right? Coming to terms with your past, making a meaningful apology, setting goals, writing your own obituary, heavy stuff, fairly heavy stuff. And then there's the career stuff, resume, personal statement, business etiquette, networking, some introductions to ideas of technology, not actual technology because you can't have computer in there. Andrew Glazier: So, that's how the program works, was about eight months long, seven to eight months long. And then after they graduate, when they release and most of them are going to release in the next five years. Some of them are going to release much later than that. And some of them may never release. Those that may never release are those with longer sentences. Many of them will become our peer facilitators. So they actually then come back as TAs for the class and they actually helped run the class. So there's a peer support that gets built in there, which is a big part of our success. Andrew Glazier: When people release we're there for them with this post release program, so we have someone on the outside, often formerly incarcerated, not always, who will do an intake with them. We give them a Chromebook and then we start to do some workshops with them. And we're working to build employer partnerships to be able to connect people to jobs. And really, our primary outcome when people come out, is that they get employed. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: And then the next outcome is, to go back to prison, which has a recidivism rate. And then the secondary outcome is really that's what the outcome of, do they start a business? In my view, if we have 3% of these people coming out of our entrepreneurs and trainer, EIT is we call it, if 3% of our EIT's coming out, start businesses, and the rest of them have jobs that are meaningful to them and they're able to stay out prison, we hit a home run. Mark Wood: Yeah. Andrew Glazier: So, that's really what we're working towards. And when they're outside, we also try to bring in the volunteer component again and help build community that it feels like an accepting, nonjudgmental community for people when they're out. So they really have place to where they feel supported. Mark Wood: Yeah. Patty Vest: Andrew, obviously the epidemic we're all living is affecting everybody, but tell us, how is that affecting your work? Andrew Glazier: Yeah, I mean the biggest thing is the prisons are closed, right? We can't do our work in prisons right now, the way that we're used to doing it. And also our work is built around building community. Whether it's building community inside or bringing volunteers and be part of that community or building community outside. So, we have to find a way to build community now when we can't get together. Right? Patty Vest: Yeah. Andrew Glazier: That's really challenging. But we are also, "If nothing, it's not adaptable," here at Defy. So, I think for the prison work, we're trying to think of any possible way that we can reach in. And so right now we're working on trying to send books in with like a book club where they can continue to read a book and then give them a study guide to even if they're getting together in groups of two or three inside, they could talk about this book. Or if we have peer facilitators inside, they may be able to continue to run the class. So we send the textbooks yet. We're trying to get letters in from our volunteers. So, that people inside know that there are still people in the world that care about them. Andrew Glazier: And that is a big piece of what frankly helps people transform, is this realization that, A, they're not alone. And B, that somebody cares about them, right. And that feeling of not being alone of care, I've seen it happen over and over again for somebody who walks in the door, feeling angry and detached and not sure about what they want to do. And then they realize there are people that are willing to give them that chance, and willing to be empathetic, and the switch flips for them. And that's what can lead to this transformation in really important ways. Andrew Glazier: So, trying to maintain that connection from outside to inside, and then in the post release space, like everybody we're using a lot of zoom and trying to create programming that we can do remotely. So, we're now programming online workshops and we're putting together a book club actually, where we're going to have both volunteers and our EITs get together and be part of a book club, and talk about a book every week and having kind of community nights, where people will get on a zoom and they're able to really kind of just talk about what's going on. Andrew Glazier: And then we'll see how that evolves, but really trying to find ways to build community and personal connection, even in a time when we can't physically be connected. Mark Wood: Talking about building community, we did a story about you in the most recent issue of Pomona Collage magazine, and it ends with a description of a trust building exercise that you do, that I found really moving. Andrew Glazier: Yeah. Mark Wood: Can you tell us about that? Andrew Glazier: Yeah. One of the exercises we do with our EITs and with volunteers at our volunteer days is something called step to the line. We certainly didn't invent it, but the way it works is, you have volunteers lined up on one line and we have our EITs lineup on another line directly across from them. So we're facing each other. And we ask a series of or we say a series of statements, and if they're true people step forward to this line, and if they're not true, they step away. Andrew Glazier: It becomes this silent, organic sharing exercise that is really a way for people to learn about each other and learn really about what they have in common, in a place where people feel like they may walk in there and feeling like they don't have a lot of common. Mark Wood: Yeah. Andrew Glazier: But over the course of this exercise, it is this very revealing kind of raw experience where people connect without saying a word, about common past and common experiences, and are able to really practice empathy. The amazing thing about it is that, there are so many people in this world who believe that their experiences, maybe the problem they've had in their life is unique. Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: That they're the only ones who could possibly have had this issue. And then they get in this room and they realize, they look around on some of these statements that are read and they realize, "You know what? I'm not the only one who struggles with addiction, and I'm not the only one who had violence in my family." Andrew Glazier: Things that we as a society pushed down and hide, and you bring them out there and people realize sometimes for the first time in their life, that they're not the only ones who have had that experience and that's life changing. I spoke to a woman at the women's prison in Corona, not too far from Claremont. She had been in prison in and out since she was seven. And she was on her fifth or sixth bid in prison, mid 50s, incarcerated with her daughter. Mark Wood: Oh man. Andrew Glazier: And they were both in our class. Mark Wood: Yeah. Andrew Glazier: And she said to me, "You know Andrew, when I did this program, it was the first time in my life I realized that I was not the only one to have these problems. I was not the only one to have had these experiences and that I wasn't alone." Mark Wood: Wow. Andrew Glazier: And that's amazing coming from a woman who's in her 50s. And I think for her, that was life changing, because all of a sudden she felt that she could make a human connection and some of her fellow EITS were like, "Yeah, she's really, really changed." Andrew Glazier: And I think that that human connection, in fact that's not a incarcerated person thing, right. That's not a damaged person thing. That's an everybody person thing, right? Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Andrew Glazier: Those human connections are what makes us human. And are what makes us realize that, "You know we're not alone and that there are people to support us and that we have something to offer the world." And that, for somebody who lives their life believing they've gotten nothing, that no one cares and no one understands them and to move this place of, "I made a human connection. Someone understood me." Is life changing. Mark Wood: Yeah. Patty Vest: Andrew, to end up, if some of our listeners would like to get involved in this kind of work, what can they do? Or what are some recommendations that you have for them? Andrew Glazier: Yeah. If you're in a place where we run our programming, which you can check our website, www.defyventures.org, you can look on there and see where we're running programming. And if you are in an area in Northern California, Southern California, Colorado, greater Chicago area, New York, Connecticut at Washington State, if you're in one of those spots and you want to join for one of our trips, you can sign up there, just take a look at what we're running. Right now we're not running anything, obviously, because we're waiting for the prisons to reopen. Andrew Glazier: There are opportunities to get involved in some of our post release work right now. Folks want to join one of our online book clubs. You can check our site, signups are listed there. Sign up for the mailing list, you can see what we're doing, and we'd love to have you join and come inside and it will change your life if you do. Certainly we're even looking for volunteers and we're looking for people who want to support the work. Andrew Glazier: It's a weird time to be asking for money right now from anybody who isn't or for anything that isn't directly related to a virus. But these are vulnerable populations that we're serving. And they are people who very at risk. Not only from getting sick, but just from what's happening with the economy and where we go from here. And if you're an employer, we were trying to build a movement of second chance, a fair chance employers, people are willing to give folks a shot. Get in touch, we would love to know who you are and be able to refer people for employment. Andrew Glazier: I think this is an important social justice movement, is important thing for people to get involved with. And I hope people will check it out and even if all people do is find an opportunity to come to prison with us and see what that's like, right? It'll change your mind. It'll change your mindset, it'll change your life. It all just gives you a window into how your tax dollars are being spent. And what is this criminal justice system that we all like to pretend doesn't exist? Mark Wood: So on that note, we're going to wrap this up. Andrew Glazier: Interesting. Mark Wood: We've been talking to Andrew Glazier, class of 1997, the president and CEO of Defy Ventures. Thanks Andrew. Andrew Glazier: Thanks for having me. Patty Vest: Thanks Andrew. And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast at Pomona Collage stay safe, and until next time.