Official Interview with the Students Collaborating with Free Mind
Get to know the group reimagining Free Mind’s web presence.
Have you ever wished you could make a real difference in your community? In 2010, Communications and Media Studies Professor Aimee Knight, founded the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative to do just that. The Beautiful Social Research Collaborative is a non-profit organization and class at Saint Joseph’s University that fosters collaboration between organizations enacting transformative change in their communities and communications students academically trained in a variety of skills ranging from media production to social media management to graphic design.
This semester, fellow Anneliese Ashley is leading students Isabella Colina Hidalgo, Colin Cooper, Alexa Fichera, and Denzel Jones in collaborating with the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network, an organization run by former juvenile lifer Stacey Torrance that provides resources and training to people re-entering the workforce after incarceration.
I sat down with these students to learn more about their work with the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network.
What community partner have you guys been paired up with and what is the ultimate goal of the partnership?
Colin: We’re partnered with the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network, which is essentially a non-profit that exists to support formerly incarcerated people in the workforce, especially with all of the discrimination that formerly incarcerated people typically face when trying to find jobs. The main goal is focusing a lot on the idea of second chances and promoting resources that people are able to take advantage of in order to help with their reentry into society and their reintegration into their normal lives. Second chance awareness month is in April, so that’s something we’re really pushing for and we’re really doing a lot of raising awareness for all of them.
What are you guys helping them with? What are you guys co-creating with them?
Denzel: Currently we’re working on a newsletter and trying to revamp and create the overall online presence and social media presence, creating templates for their Instagram. In the future, we plan to work on creating concepts for their LinkedIn as well as more concepts for their website.
Alexa: And in April, which is Second Chance Awareness Month, we’re doing a panelist event so that’s really going to be our big push.
How have you guys been planning or pacing yourselves to complete the end goal of your partnership?
Colin: Well, I know outside of Alexa and I, everyone else has worked with Free Mind in the past last semester. So, we kind of just were able to hit the ground running and jump right into meeting with Stacey [Torrance] who runs Free Mind and sort of understand what his goals have been. So I think we’ve been pretty fast paced and pretty focused on trying to get started on as much as we can while we can.
What progress have you guys made so far and how did you go about it?
Colin: So, we just reached out to all of our panelists and have started to confirm people for our event. That was using contacts of people who Stacey wanted to be involved, seeing whose schedules worked and whose didn’t. We’ve also just been planning essentially what our social media presence is going to be leading up to that event in April and also just what our general strategy is going to be. A lot of throwing ideas out there and sorting out what we think would work and what we think wouldn’t.
Alexa: We’re definitely a hands-on group and kind of just sit down and say what we think would be good and what’s not working. We’re all really welcoming to new ideas and collaborating with each other, so it’s a really good group.
Denzel: Aside from what we’ve accomplished or are trying to accomplish this semester, last semester I was here, we were able to entirely recreate the website as well as create podcast content and we had a string of different instagram posts for a course of about two months where we just did a newsletter and blogging and interviews so we’re trying to continue that as well throughout this semester.
What challenges have you all faced in this project?
Colin: We’ve been trying to do, sometimes, too much.
Alexa: [laughs] yeah.
Has that been a challenge? Wanting to do too much at once?
Colin: Definitely, I think, because I mean, we only meet…
Anneliese: Twice a week.
Colin: Twice a week. Realistically once, because, you know, only once where we’re actually able to do work for this kind of stuff, so if we have eighteen things we need to get done that’s not always really that realistic. So we get disorganized.
Denzel: I would say this community partner in particular is pretty different than other ones because this one is hands-on. And they’re also a permanent [community partner] to the Beautiful Social Research Collaborative. It’s not like something that goes away or comes back occasionally or anything. It stays on, so it’s really an entire organization that we created from, you know, the ground up a few years ago, so–
Anneliese: If you ask Stacey, Free Mind is as much B:Social’s baby as it is his baby-
Denzel: Right.
Anneliese: Because it was created here and it continues to grow here.
Isabella: So whatever we end up doing we want to make sure that we make it easier for the next group to come in and work with Stacey as well.
Anneliese: Yeah like I think last semester we started the newsletter and then now it’s just kind of like an incentive. Like if you’re joining this group, you will be doing a newsletter once a month.
How has the experience of collaborating or communicating with your community partner been?
Isabella: Amazing. Stacey’s a really good community partner.
Anneliese: I mean I think it’s a testament to the fact that Isabella has taken B:Social like eight times.
[All laugh]
Anneliese: And everytime she takes it she wants to work with Stacey again so I think that kind of just puts it into perspective. People genuinely want to work with Stacey because he is a good partner to work with. I don’t want to say he gives you all the freedom in the world but he lets you be as creative as you want and take your ideas and run with them as long as they end up working out for everyone in the long run.
Isabella: Yeah, it really does feel like a co-creation, collaboration partnership. Like, it feels like a partnership rather than him just telling us what to do.
How has being a part of B:Social impacted you personally, academically, or professionally?
Colin: Something for me is that I am really interested in a lot of prison reform stuff and social justice issues related to incarceration, so being able to interface directly with that is something that is really awesome. I didn’t know quite what the dynamic was going to be when we actually started doing work and if we were just going to be essentially interns just posting on social media but it’s proved to be much more than that. Pretty soon we’re going to start collecting stories of people who were incarcerated who got a second chance and how valuable that was to them and so being able to actually be a part of the organization as well as work for it is the biggest interest for me.
Isabella: So, when I interviewed with Comcast, which is like where I’m going to work, I remember talking about all the work that I did with B:Social and I remember talking about Stacey and the partnership and all of that. So I feel like it definitely has impacted me because I gained so many skills that I’m able to talk about when I go into interviews that I was able to get a full time job.
Anneliese: I think, academically, it’s challenged me a little bit more. Every other class you’re handing in work. In this class you’re not turning things in but you’re making a product to satisfy the community partner and I think it’s an experience you don’t really get at other schools. So, I feel like academically that is what I would say B:Social has helped me with.
Denzel: I don’t know other schools who do something like this, so I feel like it’s really good to have this as a talking point. When I’m interviewing, I always try to mention it because it sounds very interesting to the interviewer because it’s not some little project, you’re actually working on real life issues and you’re using so many skills of design, media, socials… it’s a lot of different things to showcase. So, I know for me it’s really good to have on my portfolio
Carina Seabra interviewed Anneliese Ashley, Isabella Colina Hidalgo, Colin Cooper, Alexa Fichera, and Denzel Jones in person on February 21, 2024. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. As of March 3, 2024, a date for Free Mind’s panelist event has not been set, but is planned to take place sometime in April.
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