Life After Life
Website
Community Partner
Life After Life is a support group facilitated by a group of formerly incarcerated individuals who were sentenced as juveniles to life in prison without the possibility of parole. They came together as an organization that aims to support returning citizens by providing them with a way to share their stories. With the community’s collective voice, Life After Life aims to achieve four separate goals: First, to educate not only those in a position to create change but also the general public about the consequences of extremely lengthy sentences for youth. Second, to work with the media to promote individual stories of transformation and redemption. Third, to support similar organizations advocating for children headed by those who were formerly incarcerated. And finally, to develop youth outreach and intervention strategies to curb the epidemic of violence and drug abuse that is prevalent within many high schools across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Challenge
Our challenge with Life After Life was to create a WordPress site that their support group can use as their “one-stop-shop” for all interest and promotion purposes. Some of the main highlights of our WordPress site include personal stories and biographies of the members, a blog, and a section for their work that has been highlighted in the press. The biggest challenge, aside from creating the website itself, was figuring out how to juxtapose the trauma of the members’ lives with the successes they have accomplished since their reentry into society. Life After Life is dedicated to sharing the entire stories of those who have been affected by Death by Incarceration and the subsequent prison reforms. It is essential to include both the “good” and “bad” of each story; not every individual who has re-entered society has had success in their new life.
Another aspect of our project was to conduct a small workshop on the basics of navigating WordPress. We met with some of the core members of Life After Life on Saint Joe’s campus where we guided them step-by-step. We showed them how to login into their WordPress account, edit media, and create new pages and posts. In this workshop, we also talked through what content they want to eventually include on the website, helping them think about what steps to take going forward.
Strategic Thinking
In working with an organization that is in the process of establishing themselves, our vision was to create a website for Life After Life that captures their goals and mission. After an initial meeting with our community partner, it was clear that the organization wants to recruit potential members while also educating an audience unfamiliar with the detriment faced by people sentenced to life in prison. The way to do this is by telling the stories of existing members.
Life After Life’s mission is clear, so we approached the execution of this mission using Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle” as inspiration. We know their ‘why,’ so we met with them to determine their ‘what’ and their ‘how.’ On the website we created for the organization, Life After Life will tell their stories through links to press on members of the organization and eventually, blog posts and audio stories in the form of podcasts. These deliverables were unrealistic for the amount of time we had with our community partner, so our role was to create a platform for storytelling and to collaborate with them to formulate ideas on how to best tell these stories.
Results
The main project our group worked on was a Wordpress site for Life After Life to ultimately post blogs, written works, podcasts, and biographies of the individuals involved. We believe that any group of people that has a message they want to spread and a change they want to make should have a site for audience visitation and interaction. A website is a great starting place for any group or organization, and as a relatively new group, Life After Life was no exception.