Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Sitting in a small room in his apartment block\u2019s co-working space in Yonkers, New York, Andre Peart joins a 10am call with his IT team halfway across the country.The 33-year-old chief executive and founder of Untapped Solutions is chatting to colleagues about technology updates to their free platform which, since 2020, has offered support to people coming out of prison \u2014 helping them to find jobs, and access healthcare and education. Besides being a case management system, the platform offers a subscription service to non-profit and government bodies, for job referrals, and also creates reports on former inmates\u2019 progress.Information logged on the system can then be analysed to show organisations what they can do to help people more quickly and efficiently.Each year, more than 600,000 people are released from prisons across the US. While programmes to help former inmates reintegrate into society vary from state to state, critics say most are inadequate in helping people get back on their feet and stay out of prison.Mass incarceration in the US has ballooned in the past five decades, and is up by 500 per cent since 1970, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The US is home to the largest number of prisoners worldwide \u2014 around 2mn people are currently imprisoned in the country.Keeping people out of prison once they are released is therefore a priority \u2014 and one that Untapped Solutions aims to tackle by harnessing the power of technology.Peart\u2019s idea to set up the platform was rooted in personal experience. Raised between Harlem and Yonkers, a northern suburb of New York City, he says his childhood was great until he became a teenager.\u201cAs I got to that decision-making age [between] 13 and 16, things started to switch up just because of the neighbourhood we landed in,\u201d he says \u2014 noting that his family moved around a lot. Born to a Jamaican mother and a British father, Peart says he found a certain understanding in the streets that was missing from home.He began to get involved in gangs and was arrested multiple times. In 2012, he was sent to a prison upstate to serve a six-year sentence for a gang-related crime.While in prison, Peart rediscovered the Christian faith of his childhood and became a teacher, encouraging fellow inmates to change their lives. This helped him qualify for early release in 2018. At the time of his release, he was unaware of any re-entry programmes. \u201cThey gave me $40 and a bus ticket to whatever city in the state of New York I wanted to go to,\u201d he says. \u201cThat was the best thing they could do for you.\u201dPeart struggled to readjust to his new life: trying to find a job with a felony criminal record, while juggling family responsibilities and meeting the conditions set out by the court. He ended up homeless for many months.\u201cThe criminal legal system was not designed to work for people who look like [me],\u201d Peart says. Black Americans, like Peart, make up 14 per cent of all US residents but represent 35 per cent of prison and jail populations. American women are also disproportionately affected, with their rates of incarceration rising faster than those of men for decades. On being introduced to the professional social networking site LinkedIn by a mentor, Peart recalls he had an idea: \u201cWhat if we had this, but for people like me?\u201d 2mnThe number of people currently imprisoned in the USWith the help of a social impact accelerator scheme in Atlanta, sponsored by Techstars Atlanta, he was able to meet investors and start raising enough capital to build Untapped Solutions. Soon, the new platform attracted a $150,000 investment from the De-Carceration Fund, a Philadelphia-based venture capital fund specialising in early-stage tech start-ups that aim to disrupt the criminal legal system.Chris Bentley, the fund\u2019s founder and managing principal, says Untapped Solutions stood out as a way for non-profits, employers and former inmates to connect, with the potential to make the re-entry process more efficient for everyone involved.The De-Carceration Fund raises capital from a network of limited partners \u2014 including high-net-worth individuals, investing groups, mission-aligned foundations, and others \u2014 to invest in companies focused on returning power to those who, the fund says, the justice system has victimised.\u201cThis problem is not solved by policy\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009philanthropy\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009[or] the market alone,\u201d Bentley says. \u201cIt\u2019s taking those three things together and finding innovations to scale good policy or disrupt bad policy.\u201d He believes there should be economic opportunities to create better business models and outcomes for vulnerable people involved in the criminal legal system.The De-Carceration Fund has invested in businesses across the country but, in Philadelphia, it has found an impact investing ecosystem, offering the opportunity to foster new partnerships with companies, local universities and boards that are aligned with the fund\u2019s mission.To date, Peart says Untapped Solutions has raised $1.7mn of capital, with a $120,000 investment from Techstars Atlanta, $150,000 from Google, and $100,000 from Dream.org, a non-profit organisation committed to ending mass incarceration, among others. More than 120,000 formerly incarcerated people are now using the platform, which is gearing up for a series A funding round next year.Peart says the company has succeeded in fundraising, to date, because it understands its customers and what is important to them.One of the most recent partners to join the platform is the Centre for Alternative Sentencing and Employment Services (Cases), a New York City-based non-profit organisation that offers services to people in the court system. Through an ongoing pilot programme, Cases supports the platform\u2019s users in finding jobs, education programmes, and occupational health certifications.Grace Garcia, a social worker and borough supervisor of the organisation\u2019s office in Queens, says one of the best things about the Untapped Solutions platform is that it cuts through the red tape around employment.\u201cThis is a platform that\u2019s designed to support individuals who have been justice impacted, behavioural health impacted, et cetera,\u201d she says. People with incarceration backgrounds often worry about not being able to pass background checks, she points out. Nico Hammonds, a community engagement specialist at Cases, often walks clients through the sign-up process to show them how to use the platform and apply for jobs. \u201cWe want to make sure they\u2019re a part of it \u2014 this is their journey, their story,\u201d she says.Hammond and Gracia say the platform has made their work more efficient as they can spend less time job searching for individuals and focus more on helping them with interview preparation.Nearly 21,000 people leave prison every year in New York.In March, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a $14mn investment in Rikers Island, one of the most notorious prisons in the country, with a portion due to be spent on transition planning to address re-entry challenges.The city has been grappling with plans to close the prison and replace it with a smaller network of localised jails, but construction delays and issues with overcrowding have stalled progress.The government could stop this\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009We know what to do, we just need to do it Norrinda Brown, an associate professor of law at Fordham University in New York, says years of bad policy have created the problem of mass incarceration and advocates closing prisons across the country.\u201cWe didn\u2019t have this prison population before we did,\u201d she says. \u201cWe existed without [mass incarceration] until the 1980s, and we\u2019re letting this persist.\u201d\u00a0\u201cThe government could stop this,\u201d she argues. \u201cWe know what to do, we just need to do it.\u201dBrown is also sceptical of innovation by tech players in impact investing, and says philanthropy is a better way to make a difference. \u201cThe billionaires who give all their money away, that\u2019s what we need,\u201d she says. \u201cThey tend to give to the people who know [what to do with it]. They don\u2019t want to micromanage it. They\u2019re just giving,\u201d she says.Bentley at the De-Carceration Fund agrees that the market, alone, cannot solve all the problems. \u201cThe critical thing is to make sure that our solutions are aligned, to scale good policy trends, or [to] disrupt bad policy trends \u2014 and are built on the knowledge that was gained through all the advocacy reform work that\u2019s been done over the years.\u201dThrough partnerships with local departments of corrections, Untapped Solutions says it now has a presence in every state in the US. Peart\u2019s main focus is to further integrate the platform with social service departments, caseworkers and government agencies.\u201cHumans alone will not solve the issue of helping people rehabilitate successfully,\u201d says Peart. \u201cIt\u2019s also about capital, strong connections to government prisons, department of corrections, parole, and probation offices, and getting them to adopt this technology.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Sitting in a small room in his apartment block\u2019s co-working space in Yonkers, New York, Andre Peart joins a 10am call with his IT team halfway across the country.The 33-year-old chief executive and founder of Untapped Solutions is chatting to colleagues about technology updates<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-94485","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}