EXCHANGE FOR CHANGE

Exchange for Change believes in the power of written partnerships to promote dialogue and effect social change. We teach writing in prisons and facilitate anonymous writing exchanges between classrooms in correctional facilities and classrooms in high schools and universities. Our facilitators ( MFA and Ph.D. candidates, published writers, and full-time university professors) are experts in their fields, and the need for their expertise is real. The United States houses five percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. Incarceration has become our society's response to poverty, substance abuse, and inadequate health care; prison only exacerbates these problems. Exchange for Change is committed to promoting dialogue across social and institutional barriers, and particularly to collaborating with incarcerated writers to foster empathy and create individual and social change. Our programs help individual writers realize the value of their own experiences, and conceive of themselves as more than the product of their worst mistake. We work to increase public awareness about the causes and effects of mass incarceration and we create opportunities for shared action toward social change. Ultimately, our work hopes to move the justice system in South Florida away from mass incarceration and towards a more humane and restorative model.

Exchange for Change (E4C) programming fosters creative and critical expression, improves literacy and communication skills, and provides an increased sense of personal and community identity. Interested inmates first participate in a core 12- to 16-week intensive writing course taught by a trained facilitator. Our “inside" students, after completing their core writing course, can then pursue advanced classes, including classes focused on specific genres and techniques (such as rhetoric or debate), as well as “exchange classes" in which incarcerated students engage in guided anonymous letter-exchanges with university and high school students on the outside. These “outside" exchange students develop empathy and learn to see their “inside" partners as more than just the crime they committed. E4C additionally offers one-on- one writing tutoring sessions and a Spanish-language writing class. By educating students on both sides of the penal system, we hope to provide necessary learing and dialogue on both ends.

We began in the summer of 2014 with one writing class at Dade Correctional Institution; that fall we established our Board of Directors and our advisory board, and we held our first anonymous writing exchange program with students at the University of Miami. This summer, for example, we are offering 15 courses, including core writing courses, specialty advanced classes, poetry workshops, playwriting, journalism, debate, and rhetoric. From DCI we have expanded to four other corrections facilities, and our Board and Advisory Board now include the Dean of Students at Ransom Everglades, the Associate Director of Composition at the UM, the Director of Writing at Florida Atlantic University (FAU), internationally best‑selling authors along with marketing and financial professionals. Our exchange partners include FAU, Miami-Dade College, UM, and Ransom Everglades. Our partnership with O, Miami provides us with poetry publications and facilitators, and UM's Writing Center provides us with professors who offer one-on- one tutoring to our incarcerated students. Soon we will be teaching a course for juvenile offenders at Turner Guilford Knight and running a Spanish-language writing exchange. Our growth—in terms of our board, our student body, and our course offerings—speaks to the success of our program.

So far, we have gotten testimonials and support from many students and organizations, including higher education institutions such as Florida Atlantic University, Florida International University, Miami Dade College, and the University of Miami. We've also grown substantially since our founding. We began in the summer of 2014 with one writing class at Dade Correctional Institution; that fall we established our Board of Directors and our advisory board, and we held our first anonymous writing exchange program with students at the University of Miami. This summer, for example, we are offering 15 courses, including core writing courses, specialty advanced classes, poetry workshops, playwriting, journalism, debate, and rhetoric.