Laura Glesby Photo
Harold Jones, in the "flow" scooping early fall leaves in Upper Westville.
“You can’t work with a cluttered mind,” said Harold Jones as he de-cluttered the Ijeh family’s front yard — on a job outing where stories of incarceration and reentry, witnessed and experienced from different angles, had a chance to intersect.
Jones brought that sense of calm to a three-person crew landscaping an Edgewood Way house in Upper Westville Thursday morning — part of his work with EMERGE, an organization that aims to help men re-entering society from prison find employment, community, and more internal peace as they navigate their transition.
EMERGE accepts cohorts of 20 to 25 people at a time who have recently been incarcerated, providing six to nine months of paid employment along with a variety of educational and peer support initiatives. The organization is based in New Haven, with plans to expand into Bridgeport this year. According to Executive Director Alden Woodcock, participants of the program have a 12 percent rate of recidivism within two years of reentry, while the state as a whole, as of 2023, has seen a recidivism rate of 67 percent within three years of leaving prison.
On top of fixing up streets with the city’s public works department, cleaning Fair Haven’s major thoroughfare with the Grand Avenue Special Services District, and planting trees across the city with the Urban Resources Initiative, crew members work with individual homeowners who need help with yard work and internal demolition. “We try to expose these guys to different jobs,” Woodcock said.
Thus Thursday’s leaf-clearing job at the Ijeh family’s home in Upper Westville.
The nonprofit is seeking to grow its client base of homeowners willing to contract the team for landscaping work — especially people with small-to-medium sized yards who will treat EMERGE crew members with warmth and kindness, rather than judgment. Reinaldo Cruz, EMERGE’s director of training and business development, envisions scaling up to a full-time landscaping operation one day. Currently, Cruz said, EMERGE provides landscaping services for a total of five clients, including former Mayor Toni Harp.
"The Gifts Of Failure"
Supervisor Ra Hashim: “It feels different when you got someone rooting for you.”
When Ra Hashim got out of prison on July 27, 2020, he knew he needed a fresh start. After being incarcerated in North Carolina from age 23 to 31, he decided to move up to Connecticut.
For over a month afterwards, Hashim treated applying for work like a full-time job itself. While wearing an ankle monitor, he looked at grocery stores, big-name brands like Home Depot and Fedex, anything he could find that professed to be “felon-friendly” on the job posting website Indeed. He said he nearly got hired at Amazon — going so far as to pass a drug test and take a photo for a company ID — until his background check came back, and he said the company told him he couldn’t work there after all.
“It was nerve-wracking,” Hashim said. After leaving prison, he said, it feels like “everybody’s looking at you. The job’s so important.”
Hashim’s parole officer told him about EMERGE. Hashim had reservations — “I don’t know nothing about construction” — but he joined anyway, and quickly took to the work.
It was through EMERGE that he soon came to believe that “you need more than just a job” after leaving prison.
On top of classes ranging from financial education to a series on food system inequity called Restorative Food Justice, EMERGE hosts weekly “Real Talks,” where cohort members can raise topics for frank group conversations. The Real Talks “threw me off” at first, Hashim said. He recalled thinking, “I don’t know any of these people.”
But over time, Hashim grew comfortable with the culture of vulnerability that EMERGE seeks to foster. The group explored concepts of “being a man” and questions like “When you heard the word ‘felon,’ how does it make you feel?” One day, Hashim brought up his own topic for the group to discuss: “the gifts of failure.”
The experience left him with the strong conviction that people transitioning back into society need emotional support — especially from people who are going through a similar life change. “You need to talk to somebody,” he said — but “a family member might not know how to ask” the right questions, and “some people might not have families.”
Most EMERGE cohort members have gone through numerous educational and social “programs” over the years; it’s hard for many, Hashim said, to enroll in yet another class or support group and trust that the people running it actually care, that “this is not somebody who’s going to blame you.”
“It feels different when you got someone rooting for you,” said Hashim.
Now, Hashim is a supervisor and peer mentor at EMERGE – so that he can root for the people coming through the program after him. He recently started a podcast, Pilot Language, about life lessons and personal development. And he’s started to pick up additional work doing landscaping on the side.
“Landscaping’s a good job. You learn all these types of tools,” Hashim said. He added that he’d “always wanted to be an artist,” though he never developed the skills to paint or draw.
At EMERGE, he said, “I feel like we bring art to the landscape.”
"I Saw A Lot Of Families Disrupted"
Customers Chike and Yari Ijeh.
Yari Ijeh bought her first house in West Haven: a three-quarter acre property up a hill. Growing up in Bridgeport, she’d always lived in apartment buildings — and the mountain of tasks involved in keeping up her new West Haven home, especially as a single woman, felt overwhelming. “I did all the lawn work by myself,” she recalled.
At the time, Ijeh was a Department of Children and Families (DCF) social worker, overseeing services for kids in foster care — a job she would hold for 23 years. “I saw a lot of families disrupted. They were disrupted by incarceration,” she recalled. In her early years, “I brought kids to visit their parents in jails.”
She remembers one young teen in particular, a 14-year-old who had never met her father. The dad had been incarcerated shortly after his daughter was born, on a 70-year sentence for murder.
When that teen entered foster care, Ijeh found herself having to convince a colleague that the incarcerated dad should receive a copy of the case files. It turned out that “the dad read every single letter on that case plan.” From behind bars, he started writing his kid letters, reading every report card, and helping his daughter (who’d been raised by white family members) connect to her Black heritage. The teen found a critical mentor in her dad, recalled Ijeh — something that would never have happened “if we judged him by what he was convicted for.”
Eventually, Ijeh started a family of her own. After selling her West Haven house, she met her now-husband, Chike, and bought a home with him on Edgewood Way. She got a new job as the chief business development officer at the local mental health and homeless services provider Clifford Beers Community Health Partners. Since they bought the house in 2015, they’ve enlisted EMERGE to help not only with landscaping, but with maintenance work and — soon — with interior painting.
“EMERGE gives an opportunity to our people,” Ijeh said — primarily Black and Brown people, who are disproportionately likely to be affected by incarceration. “It’s been A+,” she added. “My calls have never, ever been unanswered.” She spreads the word about the program whenever she can.
The couple is now raising two young children, and they’ve found in EMERGE an “opportunity to talk about how we don’t judge people” for their pasts, Ijeh said.
The trauma of family incarceration that Ijeh has witnessed through her work shows up in its own way at EMERGE, according to Woodcock. Growing up with an incarcerated parent substantially increases a child’s chances of one day ending up in prison themselves. Over his 12 years at the organization, Woodcock said, he’s seen numerous father-son pairs go through the program at different points in time — even a grandson. He noted that EMERGE offers a parenting education program that focuses on attachment styles. He envisions the program as “a family atmosphere” — and a place for intergenerational healing.
A "Stepping Stone" to a CDL
Crewmember Harold Jones (left).
When 25-year-old Harold Jones heard about the opportunity to find both employment and support services through EMERGE, his first thought was, This has got to be a hoax. “Coming from my background,” said Jones, “I’m used to being told things” that don’t turn out to be real.
Still, Jones gave the program a shot — and he’s found himself dabbling in all kinds of trades as a result, ranging from concrete cutting to interior house demolition to landscaping jobs like Thursday morning’s.
Jones, who grew up in Bridgeport, is a man prone to positivity. After two years in prison, he’s now living in a halfway home based in New Haven while on supervised release. While it can be hard living in communal housing, “you get time to situate yourself,” he said. He sees this time in his life as a “stepping stone” to something better.
Jones said that EMERGE helped him sketch out a clearer vision of what that “something better” might be: in his case, a commercial driver’s license (CDL) enabling him to find work as a truck driver. He named that goal in a “life plan” exercise at EMERGE, and he said he’s already about halfway through CDL training, expecting to be finished by next year.
As Jones works to leave behind his past, he’s holding onto this vision of the future — while letting himself focus on the present, at least while at work. “I just like to get in the flow,” he said, raking up the dead leaves to reveal the green below.
Alden Woodcock and Reinaldo Cruz with the leaves collected on Thursday.