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Photo: (Drive Change)
Every Thursday in November, we’re profiling amazing changemakers we’re seriously thankful for. This Thursday, we’d like to introduce you to Jordyn Lexton from Drive Change.
If you think the cost of college tuition is high, get a load of this: According to the New York Times, it costs the government an estimated $168 million a year to keep someone in jail in New York City. That's approximately 29 years of tuition for an in-state resident at a City of New York college. Unfortunately, while you might be the most well-prepared person ever after almost 30 years in school, the same isn't true of spending even a short time in jail.
Meet Jordyn Lexton, a 27-year-old New Yorker who is changing the way young people enter and leave the prison system by providing opportunities and real-life job training to young men when they get out. Her tool of change? Food trucks. Yes, you heard that right: a food truck. We sat down with Jordyn to get the scoop (pun intended), on her sweet idea and big, truly inspiring plans.
Image may be NSFW.
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Photo: (Jordyn Lexton)
ACT: Why did you start your organization, Drive Change?
JORDYN: I started Drive Change in concept about two years ago. I was a teacher on Rikers Island for three years, and I was working with adolescents, with detainees mostly, so young people who were waiting to hear what their sentence was. These were mostly young men ages 16, 17 and 18 years old. This is how I found out that New York was one of two states that set the age of criminal responsibility at 16 years old.
My students were really full of potential and had the desire to live crime-free productive lives, but were facing such barriers to employment and education upon release, due to the fact that they were leaving with adult felonies as opposed to juvenile offenses. I would see so many students of mine recycle back through the system, and I started to think to myself that it really doesn’t matter much what we're doing here (in the classroom) if we're not consciously thinking about that fragile re-entry time.
At the time, Getting Out and Staying Out was the only reentry organization I knew of that had the unique angle of actually building relationships with people while they're currently incarcerated, so that the process of retention when someone goes home is a little bit more secure. If someone sees a familiar face there’s more of a likelihood that they might want to come back again.
ACT: So how does Drive Change work?
I’m an advocate of alternative education, and I wanted to create something that would also teach transferable skill learning. So again adding components of myself to this puzzle — I love food and I’ve been able to travel and taste different tastes, so I started to follow food trucks a little bit and I actually just had this amazing thing while traveling in Canada with my family, which was just fresh snow with hot syrup on top. It was just amazing the combination of temperature, it was wrapped up, and I tasted the taffy and I was like. 'Wow, that’s unbelievable and pure,' and I just decided in that moment that I was going to open up a snow cart and hire my students, and that’s how we were going to make a difference in this.
+ Watch The Story Of Drive Change.
Drive Change pays the students $10 an hour and offers counseling services as part of the program. We're about three weeks away from our first truck being finished and complete, and it’s called “Snowday” and it’s going to be awesome. The food is amazing, and the plan right now is to have a soft launch for the first four to six months as a way to really build the business and the following. We're currently working with some justice-involved people; I've hired formerly incarcerated people, and we have a formerly incarcerated chef as well. In the spring of 2014 we plan on running our full re-entry program, which is an eight-month transitional program that helps justice-involved youth adapt to life outside of prison.
I also wanted Drive Change to be something more visible and mobile because I wanted people to have interaction with young people in the system to sort of dispel the stigma and also raise awareness for the Raise The Age campaign.
ACT: You raised over $130,000 in a very short amount of time. How did you raise that money?
JORDYN: We raised $42,000 on Indiegogo and then raised $35,000 at one event, and then through some private donations. I think really the time I spent building the criminal justice support created a real cushion for the legitimacy of what we were doing and created excitement around what we were doing. So, by the time we were really ready to start raising money, we had a good group of people who were ready to push it out for us.
Snowday offers insanely delicious menu items, like maple grilled cheese, and maple bacon brussels sprouts.
Image may be NSFW.
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Photo: Maple Bacon Brussels Sprouts, yum! (Jordyn Lexton)
ACT: What are some ways young people can get involved with the prison reform movement in general, as well as Drive Change?
JORDYN: There’s a campaign right now in New York to raise the age of criminal responsibility. Raise The Age is the official name of the campaign and a lot of other organizations are supporting it. About 50,000 16 and 17 year old's are arrested as adults each year in New York, so sign up, write to local legislators, and sign any petitions to advocate for raising the age.
There is such a different tone then when it comes from advocates and legislators, but when it comes from young people themselves, be it those directly impacted or just in general peers that care about this, it is such a huge thing. I actually started Drive Change by having my students write letters to local legislators about the experience of being a young person incarcerated as an adult and the impact that had on them, and trying to boost up people to give them the confidence to see that their voice really does matter. I think engaging in these conversations in school is important at a young age because a lot of advocacy work is around young people knowing their rights, and really education in this way can be really helpful because it really does both broaden awareness and also arm people with a sense of knowledge going forward.
ACT: Do you have any media, books, movies that you would recommend around this issue?
I recommend “The House I Live in.” It tells about the relationship between institutionalized racism in the criminal justice system, and in the criminalization of drugs throughout history, and the impact that has had on marginalized people and certain people of specific races and demographics. The New Jim Crow is also a book that reveals a lot about incarceration and the systemic nature of the system, and of the prison cycle, especially in relationship to poverty, race, and cities. It’s definitely something I recommend people read and become aware of as well.
To learn more about Drive Change and prison reform, check out the action links below.