Our Initiative
Student Voices from the Inside
“It’s fulfilling a want. Helping us to grow. While we’re here, it forces us to engage.”
“It’s broken down my barriers and opened my mind. …I am giving people a chance.”
“I’m growing...I’m seeing things from different standpoints...It’s expanding our horizon.”
“I’m glad that I stayed... It’s big that you care about us all. Keep coming and keep staying with us.”
“I became open to other opinions. It gave me the ability to agree or disagree...It turns the wheels.”
The Solidarity Building Initiative for Liberative Carceral Education (SBI) lives within the office of Community Engagement and Alumni Relations at McCormick Theological Seminary.
Our Mission: We seek to mitigate the numerous material, social, and political barriers that system impacted individuals (and their communities) experience while incarcerated and upon release.
Our Vision: We envision that liberative carceral education provides resources for intellectual and spiritual growth and flourishing for incarcerated learners and create communities of belonging and advocacy.
Our Practice: Collectively, our program activities are oriented around 1) community-building and collaboration; 2) solidarity-building and justice-making; 3) creation of life-giving works; and 4) growth as a creative process of transformation and liberation.
Our Aim: We understand justice as being in the right relationship with ourselves, with God and with others including our relationship to institutions and systems. Justice from this perspective demands an intentional investment in working at being in the right or just relationships, those relationships where people and communities flourish.
Our Model: We use a Community Driven Curriculum model to ensure that our initiative remains student and community centered. Our model is a framework for embodying our mission as praxis. We invite a wide range of community collaborators including incarcerated students detained at the Cook County Department of Corrections to offer input and shape program activities. As a collective, we co-create liberative learning spaces through a variety of learning modalities, courses, workshops, communal healing, book conversations, public lectures, teach-ins, etc.