Otha Jones overheard a presentation about the Concordance Academy of Leadership at work earlier this year. He is a manager in compliance at Wells Fargo Advisers in St. Louis. The company’s former CEO Danny Ludeman founded Concordance Academy in 2015 to support and help to retrain individuals returning from prison. Ludeman has been driving corporate St. Louis to join him in addressing this crisis, and people at the company he used to lead have been hearing a lot about it.
It struck Jones’ interest.
“I have a passion for trying to make a difference in the lives of the incarcerated,” Jones told The American on Tuesday, April 25, when Concordance Academy cut the ribbon on its new headquarters at 1845 Borman Court in Maryland Heights. “I have some nephews who are locked up back in Virginia, so I know their struggles.”
Jones decided to volunteer. He ended up on the support team organized for Aaron Adams, who spent 12 years in prison and, at age 39, is now going through the Concordance Academy program. Together, Jones said, they developed a career plan and life plan for Adams, and the team meets with him monthly.
“My team is very influential for me,” Adams told guests at the ribbon-cutting. “I call them on the weekend when I start wanting to go back to the neighborhood and kick it. Instead, I meet with one of them and get a cup of coffee or a bite to eat, and stay focused.”
Adams is one of the program’s first 100 participants. The design is to recruit people three months before their release from prison and then work with them for a year after release. The program focuses on three core areas: behavioral health and wellness, education and employment, and community and life skills. Participants take part in individual and group cognitive behavioral therapy sessions, including substance use programs. They receive career-readiness training and educational classes. They also meet with counselors and community support specialists to discuss a wide range of topics, from spirituality to housing to financial literacy.
Concordance has a partnership with Bryan Cave where the firm hires two associate attorneys who serve as Concordance Fellows, handling all of the Concordance participants’ legal issues with support from many of the firm’s other attorneys who offer their subject matter expertise where needed.
“So far it’s been a great partnership, and we have been able to help a large number of the participants with a variety of legal issues so that they can participate fully in the program without worrying about past legal issues causing them problems going forward,” said Hal Goldsmith, a partner at Bryan Cave (and former federal prosecutor) who works closely on the Concordance project. The firm does it all on a pro bono basis, with no cost to Concordance or the participants.
“They take care of you,” Xavier Smith, 26, told The American. Smith said the program has helped him with “education, job readiness and digital literacy” in the four months he has been released from prison and receiving services in the offices the academy had been sharing with the St. Louis Regional Chamber downtown.
The new headquarters – a 31,000-square-foot facility in an office park at Westport –
was renovated with private donations. Of the $15 million in funding commitments that Ludeman said they have secured for Concordance Academy to date, he said about 25 percent has come from a mix of public funds from St. Louis, St. Louis County and St. Charles County.
The program is too new to have graduated anyone, but already has plans to grow. Ludeman said they plan to serve 250 people per year for the next three years and then scale up to 1,000 people regionally by 2020. Then they plan to expand to Kansas City and four other states, with the eventual goal of staffing an office in all 50 states. Concordance is working to raise $6 to 7 million more to fund the organization for four years.
“This is the first holistic, integrated, evidence-driven service provider dealing solely with formerly incarcerated individuals on the planet,” Ludeman said.
Ludeman quoted from the Bible in his public remarks at the ribbon-cutting, and a certain missionary fervor envelops the organization, but it is grounded in evidence and data and was designed to do research. An original research partnership with Washington University already has been dissolved, and a new research partner is being recruited. Jeff Smith, executive vice president and head of community engagement and public policy at Concordance Academy (and a former state senator and ex-felon himself), said the split with WUSTL ultimately will benefit the independence of their research, since the original program design had service providers and the researchers studying them grouped together administratively. A “third-party evaluator,” Smith told The American, will have more credibility under peer review.
Some data on which the work at Concordance Academy is based: 72 percent of people who leave prison do not find a full-time job, their wages are 40 percent lower than people who have not been incarcerated, more than 80 percent struggle with substance abuse, they are five times more likely to be homeless than the general population, and more than 60 percent of all crimes committed in the St. Louis region are committed by people who have been to prison.
Reducing the pain, suffering and death impacted in those statistics clearly animates Ludeman, his staff and volunteers. “We want them to have what we all want: a joyful and productive life surrounded by loved ones and friends,” Ludeman said. But it also points toward a clear economic motive for the public and business sectors. “There will be a huge downstream impact in terms of economic stimulus,” Ludeman said, “by employing members of one of the most unemployable groups.”
Chris Sommers, owner of Pi Pizzeria, may not be one of the region’s largest employers, but he is working with the program. One Concordance Academy participant has earned one promotion at Pi in two months and is on his way to becoming a supervisor, Sommers said, while another is flourishing in his first three weeks on the job. Sommers said that corporate St. Louis co-owns the region’s problems and needs to play an active role in finding solutions.
Thanks to the Ferguson unrest, Sommers said, “the world looked under the rug” of the St. Louis region’s problems with race, crime and poverty. “The business community is complicit,” Sommers said. “That complicity and complacency ends today.” He encouraged other area businesses to “become a second-chance employer.”
Roderick Nunn, executive vice president and head of education and employment at the academy, was very blunt: “None of this works at all without committed employers,” Nunn said.
Aaron Adams, who spent 12 years in prison yet still feels tempted to go back and “kick it” with his old crew, also knows that Concordance Academy needs committed participants. But that comes only from within.
“This affords a good opportunity, and I am taking advantage of it,” Adams said. “I met some good people who see something in me that I see in myself. But you’ve got to see it in yourself first.”
For more information, visit concordanceacademy.org or call (314) 396-6001.
