Nearly
5 million children in the United States have had a parent in prison. So why is there so little attention to the children of incarcerated parents? Tiffany Brown has an answer:
“Maybe you’ve never met a young person who has lived with parental incarceration, but maybe it's because you’re just not asking. Sometimes we don’t ask because we don’t want to know what people are dealing with. Once we lift up the rug and know what’s going on, we have to provide support. But there are organizations like mine that really want to help.”
Since its inception in 2016,
Developing Despite Distance (3D) has supported youth with incarcerated parents to become the best version of themselves. Its Saturday meetings and Parent Connection programs help middle school and high school boys nurture healthy relationships with themselves, their peers, and their incarcerated parents. Drawing on this foundation, Director Tiffany Brown is ready to move the organization toward its next iteration – a Youth Advisory Board.
rooted in experience, rooted in care
Brown was a counselor working with high school youth on career readiness when
My Brother’s Keeper came to Detroit, to invest $500,000 for new projects in the city. Launched in 2014, My Brother’s Keeper was a nationwide initiative of the Obama administration to improve outcomes of boys of color.
“I was in my kitchen, and God put it on my heart that it costs 50 cents to write a letter, and that I could facilitate support groups after we wrote letters to help these young men process the experience of having an incarcerated parent.”
Brown threw her name in the hat with almost 500 other My Brother's Keeper grant applicants and was one of five awarded funding. She had six weeks to pilot her program.
“I had guerilla recruitment,” says Brown. “Where were we going to find these youth? Although there are
2.7 million children nationwide who currently have an incarcerated parent, this is an historically invisible population of young people.”
Brown knows what it is like to experience this invisibility. When Brown was a late teenager, her mother was sentenced to prison and spent three years away from her daughters. A school counselor and coaches at the Boys & Girls Club were a lifeline for Brown. Years later, the memory of the impact of caring adults in the midst of turmoil drives her work.
With its initial seed money, 3D grew into a regular Saturday meeting. Over the next decade, cohorts of middle and high school boys met at community centers throughout the city, processing their shared experience of parental incarceration. Staff walked alongside them with activities promoting social and emotional wellbeing, as well as financial literacy training, academic support, and career exposure.
A cornerstone of 3D is its Parent Connection program, which provides resources for young people to maintain relationships with an incarcerated parent. Some communication is letter writing and phone or video calls; but 3D also pays for gas, lodging, and food for in-person visits. Many detention facilities are hours from Detroit. An overnight hotel stay allows families to rest and often visit the loved one a second time before leaving the next day.
A broad impact
Recognizing the need for more academic support for young people, 3D pivoted to after school hours in lieu of the Saturday meeting. It now partners with the
Lawn Academy for afternoon programming for teens from Durfee Elementary-Middle School and welcomes opportunities to customize programs for other school and community groups.
This development moves 3D forward in two ways. First, the Durfee group is mixed-gender, enabling outreach to girls as well as boys. In addition, although not all young people in the group are directly affected by familial incarceration, Brown views the new format as an opportunity to inform the general peer population so that they can be allies.
These pivots lay the groundwork for their next undertaking – a Youth Advisory Board. Education and awareness are part and parcel of the mission of the emergent Youth Advisory Board.
Brown explains, “The advisory board is birthed out of wanting to have an intentional space to uplift youth voices, and for them to have opportunities for leadership and professional development, and for policy and advocacy contributions.”
The seed of the Youth Advisory Board is a core team of five young men who have matriculated through 3D’s programming. Their first priority is a series of youth-led educational workshops in May, at which they will disseminate a survey. From this, they hope to raise awareness of familial incarceration and recruit more teen applicants for the advisory board.
“I think that one of the biggest challenges is that we just don’t know where these kids are. I want to make a little noise and say, ‘Hey we’ve created our own survey, facilitated information sessions, collected data, and we know how many youth exist from this sample size and this is what they say they need.’ We will take this information to funders and community partners, and ultimately to the community to amplify awareness that we exist,” says Brown.
The Youth Advisory Board will start with participants between ages 12 and 18 in Wayne County, with a goal of expanding to Oakland and Macomb counties by 2027.
Brown is proudest of not giving up on the youth in her program, through funding challenges and Covid, and being able to see them through to successful adulthood pursuits.
“I am watching the seeds that we planted continue to blossom; and I know that I haven’t even seen the best yet. They will continue to bloom. I imagine when I’m 60 that this will be a more fruitful conversation about the things that I am most proud of.”
This story is part of the Nonprofit Journal Project, an initiative focused on nonprofit leaders and programs across Metro Detroit. This series is made possible with the generous support of our partners, the Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, Michigan Nonprofit Association and Co.act Detroit.