The BeProximate Emancipatory Scholarship was established to democratize access to higher education for students with current and or formerly incarcerated parents. The scholarship is fundamentally rooted in the notion that education, when not used to weaponize, is an emancipatory tool and an incubator for true democracy.
“The only purpose of education is freedom; the only method is experience.”
Inspired by Charles Hamilton Houston,
the formidable social engineer of the 20th century, Diana Saintil seeks to effectuate transformational change at the nexus of education and criminal justice. BeProximate activates policy-oriented discourse that galvanize people to extend their politics beyond the confines of their personal proclivities, experiences and comforts to deconstruct institutions of inequities and democratize justice with empathy and inclusion. A central premise of BeProximate is that it is our civic responsibility to harness our resources to equip people with the tools to unearth the best versions of themselves.
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken [wo]men.”
Every second,
despite recent declines, there are more than 2.7 million children with parents behind bars. Consequently, they are susceptible to being locked from the American dream as their parents traverse through the system for second chances or confront collateral consequences upon release. Furthermore, while the pervasiveness of incarceration is profound, the historical and systemic roots of racial disparities are unconscionable.
The criminal justice system
is wrought with symbiotic harms, and research posits that children are six times more likely to repeat the cycle, yielding generations of compounding achievement gaps, poverty and justice-involvement. However, you can be a disruptor and help break the cycle of generational incarceration by investing in education – an emancipatory tool for transformational change.
“An investment in education always pays the highest returns.”
