City, County pledge nearly $2M to Concordance Academy

Eighty-three percent of Missouri prisoners released to the community struggle with substance abuse; 72 percent will not find a full-time job; and 48 percent without a GED return to prison within two years.

Corporate St. Louis didn’t give these depressing statistics much attention until former CEO and president of Wells Fargo Advisors Danny Ludeman announced last May that “re-entry” programs for ex-offenders need to be a priority in the region.

After retiring, Ludeman learned about the hardships that former inmates face and how it affects families and children, he told The American. More than 14,000 children with an incarcerated parent enter the foster care system each year. Children with incarcerated parents are six to nine times more likely to become incarcerated themselves.

“It breaks your heart,” he said.  “It’s there. It’s real. We are going to first put services in place that can finally correct this problem. And we want to raise the rhetoric to this problem.”

In May, he introduced the Concordance Academy of Leadership and the Concordance Institute for Advancing Social Justice – a dual-branch nonprofit geared towards reducing prison recidivism and ultimately reducing crime in the region. It’s the first ever public, private and academic partnership focused on lowering incarceration rates in the country, he said. Ludeman became the CEO and president of the Concordance Academy on May 1, 2015.

On April 5, Ludeman announced the organization recently secured as much as $1.95 million in funding over the next three years from St. Louis County, St. Charles County and the City of St. Louis. Concordance has secured more than $12 million in contributions in total from the public and private sectors, including major employers in the region, he said.

“With this additional funding and support from our city and county leaders, local men and women returning from incarceration will receive the assistance necessary in order to rebuild productive and successful lives,” he said, “which in turn positively impacts the safety and vitality of the metropolitan area.”

St. Louis County confirmed $300,000 in 2016, with an additional $600,000 in funding by 2018. The City of St. Louis is providing an initial $250,000 in funds to support the academy, with an additional $500,000 over the following two years. In addition, the St. Charles County Council voted in January to confirm $100,000 in funds to the academy this year and possibly for the next two.

Ludeman feels that Concordance is going off the beaten path using a “holistic, integrated and evidence-driven model.” Concordance Academy is the service-providing arm, and Concordance Institute is a research center housed at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University that identifies and tests best practices to inform the academy’s work. 

The academy’s curriculum includes education and job readiness, employment, substance abuse, mental health, cognitive and relationship skills, housing and life in the community. Six months prior to release, the academy assesses each enrollee – academically, cognitively and socially – to create a customized plan for each individual. Upon release, participants engage in a yearlong program. Resources include an internal employment agency and in-patient substance abuse treatment facility.

Led by Carrie Pettus-Davis, the institute is the first research center in a school of social work dedicated to scientific discovery focusing on the issues of reincarceration.

“Nationally, seventy-seven percent of former prisoners will be rearrested for a new crime within five years of their release, largely due to inadequate support and public policies that act as barriers to reentry to communities,” Pettus-Davis said. 

In St. Louis, there is a strong network of small, underfunded non-profits that provide social services to ex-offenders locally. They’ve been doing it for decades, and they even collaborated with the 30-year-old Project COPE – which Concordance took over. (COPE’s then board chair Candace O’Connor wrote to Ludeman welcoming him to head the organization upon his retirement. The board agreed to transform it into Concordance.)

However, some of these nonprofit representatives, who wanted to go unnamed, said they don’t work with Concordance. One woman said that Ludeman held a meeting with the small nonprofits soon after he came on board.

“At that meeting, he basically said that Concordance was going to provide all the services the folks in St. Louis needed and there would not be any collaborating with other groups,” she said.

The network of nonprofits has continued to collaborate “like we’ve been doing for years,” she said.

She also said that Pettus-Davis, prior to joining Concordance, had been doing research with the network for years.

“As far as what the smaller organizations felt, there could be someone on every corner working with folks – there’s that much need,” she said. “The issue is their unwillingness to give us credit. They want to deny that there is anything good already happening in this town, and they are going to be the saviors of the world.”

Fairness Hearing for Ferguson  

U.S. Judge Catherine Perry has scheduled a Fairness Hearing regarding Ferguson’s consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice in courtroom 14 South on Tuesday, April 19 at the Thomas Eagleton United States Courthouse at 111 S. 10th St. in downtown St. Louis.

Community members are asked to sign up to speak about the consent decree beginning at 8 a.m. The hearing begins at 9:30 a.m.

If residents are unable to attend the Fairness Hearing, they are asked to mail their comments to Judge Catherine Perry, Thomas Eagleton United States Courthouse, 111 S. 10th Street St. Louis, MO 63102. 

Newcomer elected to Ferg-Flor board 

According to unofficial results of the April 5 election for the Ferguson-Florissant School District Board of Education, newcomer Connie Harge will join incumbent Leslie Hogshead on the board for a three-year term. Harge received 36.48 percent of the vote, and Hogshead received 28.81 percent of the vote. Other candidates who sought election to the board were Roger Hines, who received 23.26 percent of the vote, and Donna Dameron with 10.73 percent. Write-in votes accounted for 1.35 percent. The Board will hold a reorganization meeting on April 20 following certification of the results by the St. Louis County Board of Election Commissioners.