Practice Runs for a Free Life: Inside Our Bridge Re-Entry Program

Bernard Kelly has a favorite phrase for what happens inside our men's homes: practice runs.

As Program Manager for several men's programs at Grandma's House of Hope, Bernard oversees several tracks, including the Men’s Bridge Re-Entry Program, which serves participants coming directly out of incarceration.  They arrive through our partnership with Project Kinship, an organization that works inside the prison and jail system to prepare people for release.  Project Kinship offers trauma-informed care, therapy, and job development. What it does not offer is a place to live.

"Project Kinship does not do housing," Bernard explains.  "So Grandma's House of Hope has partnered with Project Kinship to actually house these people once they're released from jail or prison, and then we work with them to create a pathway and a bridge to re-entry into society."

That partnership is built on a simple division of labor. Project Kinship brings the clinical services: therapy, AA and NA meetings, case management and employment.  Grandma's House of Hope brings the roof, and everything that comes with keeping one over someone's head.  Curfews.  Drug testing.  Structure.  It's a controlled environment by design, one that satisfies parole officers and probation requirements, and one that gives participants something to stand on while they rebuild.

But Bernard is quick to point out that structure alone isn't the point.  What makes it work is what the structure is wrapped in.

"It looks like a home," he says. "It's not a warehouse. We're not in a gymnasium.  It doesn't look like a re-creation of a jail.  It looks like a home, so it relaxes people who are institutionalized to realize that they are out of jail, that they're back home.  It might not be their home, but it appears, it feels, it looks like a home.  And that is very, very instrumental with repairing someone's life."

For a lot of participants, Bernard says, that feeling reaches back further than their arrest.  It reaches back to childhood, to a version of home from before things went wrong.

Alongside that sense of home, Bernard runs participants through what he calls a four-step process, not handed down by Project Kinship, but developed by Grandma's House of Hope to make the partnership's goals achievable. 

Step one is simply getting comfortable with freedom itself: waking up on your own schedule, cooking a meal, walking into a grocery store without someone telling you it's allowed. 

Step two is self-sufficiency: making a doctor's appointment, catching a bus, showing up to court on your own. 

Step three, often the hardest, is reacclimation to the rhythms of working life: earning a paycheck instead of fast money, taking a write-up from a boss instead of walking away.  

Step four is reunification: rebuilding relationships with children, partners, and family, and building the healthy habits that make those relationships sustainable.

"You can't turn away from the gang or the drugs if there's nothing else life has to offer you," Bernard says.  "Drugs cannot coexist when you're working a full-time job.  Freedom cannot coexist when you're doing negative things."

The daily structure, the chores, the curfew, the case management, all of it exists in service of that shift.  Bernard describes it as practice for independence, not a substitute for it. 

"These are practice runs for when you live alone," he says. "You have to get up and clean, you have to go grocery shopping, you have to cook your own meals.  I think doing that under a structure, under supervision that they're not used to, that's very, very important."

Ask Bernard what he hopes participants carry with them after they graduate into their own housing, and the answer is short.  He wants them to stay connected.  And he wants them to keep building the habits that got them there in the first place: budgeting, follow-through, the confidence to make their own decisions after years of being told what to do.

He also wants them to leave with something harder to name.  Underneath the case management and the curfews, Bernard describes a kind of quiet emotional labor his team does every day: teaching a population that has learned to react, to survive on instinct, how to pause and think something through instead.

"This population is very reactive," he says.  "When they were on the street, somebody did something to them, they reacted.  I think the biggest thing my team has created is teaching them how to think through things without reacting first."

It's slow, unglamorous work, and Bernard says it's also the most rewarding part of his job, evidenced by the participants who call him months after they've left, just to check in or stop by and talk to the next group of guys coming through.

If you ask him what he wants people to know about Grandma's House of Hope, he doesn't lead with outcomes or statistics. He leads with a hope: that years from now, a graduate will say six words. Grandma's House of Hope changed my life.

"You've got to come check us out," he says. "You've got to see it to believe it."