This Inside-Out Program in Oregon received some excellent press this week in the magazine Oregon Quarterly. The article includes testimony from James, one of the most involved Inside alumni at the Oregon State Penitentiary.
Check out the article on pages 16-17 here!
If your local Inside-Out classes have received media coverage, please let us know so we can publicize it! Email us a link at nationalinsideoutalumni@gmail.com, or post a comment here.
A few of us at the national level are working to create a set of guidelines and “best practices” for future alumni programs. We want to help all alumni be involved and feel welcome to add insite and innovation to the national program. We are working on guidelines for projects that involve both inside and outside alumni, and specific rules about the No Contact policy and how that will allow for “programmatic contact.”
We are also compiling the experience and suggestions of the projects that have already been started (like the Oregon Book Club) to help inspire people in the creation of future projects. We’ve learned, for example, that the alumni groups often need one or two point people to get the ball rolling, but that additional structure means that more people start getting involved. We also know that it really, really helps to receive recognition and support for projects from the Inside-Out Program itself. That’s one place where the national Alumni Group can help.
Hopefully, groups will start coming together across the country very soon. We’ll have instructions and guidelines ready for them.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or suggestions for what belongs in this document, please contact us by commenting on this post, or by emailing us at nationalinsideoutalumni@gmail.com.
Posted in Guidelines, International Alumni
Posted in Oregon
We are now halfway through the fall term Inside-Out Alumni Book Club with the youth at Serbu. This time around we have twelve youth and eight Inside-Out Alumni! We are reading Calvin and Hobbes, and the term is going amazingly well. Melissa Crabbe held a second Inside-Out facilitator training for the alumni who are participating, and this was a fabulous opportunity to work through best practices and trouble shooting, in addition to gaining the skills Melissa was teaching. We are becoming quite the team of alumni together.
Only two I/O alumni were able to participate who had been involved over the summer. Ted and myself are therefore leading the group, with the new participants as extremely active members of the group. Five of the youth are participating again from the summer, and only one summer participant chose not to rejoin the group (the others were released). The more balanced numbers are great: we have done wagon wheels, held small group discussions, and overall had a much more involved and integrated feeling in the room with the balance of youth and I/O Alumni.
Two weeks ago, we had a half-hour discussion of the ideas of “fate” and “destiny,” inspired (of course) by Calvin and Hobbes. We talked about free will, and about the possibly contradictory idea that everything happens for a reason. The youth were eloquent on both counts, reflecting both a desire to feel control over their actions and a need for the security of a guiding plan to life. The level of dialogue, consistent with our own Inside-Out experiences, was much higher than what is often achieved in a college classroom. On Friday, we discussed war and peace, our tendency to turn violence into entertainment, and the damage this has on individual lives. People were so willing to be vulnerable, and to ask questions (the comic dealt with Mutually Assured Destruction and the Cold War, which the youth knew nothing about).
We’ll see what comes up in the comics next. I’m hoping to have a conversation about bullying sometime in the next couple of weeks. I’m also hoping develop a final project, hopefully to include some comic strip writing and drawing of our own.
If anyone has suggestions for material, projects, or activities, I would love to hear them. In the meantime, expect more updates soon!
Katie D, University of Oregon
