Home For Good growing in community since 2013

April 16, 2016 at 12:00a.m.

Youngstown

Home for Good Re-Entry Resource Referral Center has, since its start in November 2013, helped “returning citizens” in finding their path back to society after their release from incarceration.

Home For Good began as a new center from the Alliance for Congregational Transformation Influencing our Neighborhoods, or ACTION, in order to better address needs of people who re-enter society after incarceration.

Home For Good’s strength and reach have grown exponentially in Mahoning Valley as it engages with community service providers to help.

Lola Simmons is director of the Home For Good Center at 20 W. Federal Plaza Suite M-8 (on the second floor.) She has helped run the center for nearly three years. Home For Good doesn’t provide the services to help people released by the state, but instead provides the resources to find those services or assists in obtaining them.

After the first year, Simmons said the center helped about 225 people. Now it has doubled that number.

Simmons said she tries to instill trust, not just handing people the information but engaging with them, too.

“I think that having the knowledge gives them the ability to move on,” she said. “Whether they do or not [is up to them], but we also encourage them. ... I sit down and talk with them.”

The center actively engages with four correctional facilities: the Ohio State Penitentiary, the North East Reintegration Center (for women), Grafton Correctional Institution and Lake Erie Correctional Institution.

Just last year, under the direction of the Community Initiative to Reduce Violence, or CIRV, Home for Good collaborated with the University of Akron Law School and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to further the benefits of the Certificate of Qualification for Employment program. Enacted in 2012 this Ohio law gives hope to people with felony and misdemeanor convictions, and a chance to get jobs they otherwise couldn’t qualify for.

Of the hundreds the center assists every year, one success story stands above the rest.

Youngstown native Roy Austin, 60, said he went to Home For Good in 2013 after serving 25 years. With the center’s help in providing him with the resources he needed, Austin graduated from Youngstown State University last December, started his own nonprofit agency and serves as a member on ACTION’s Re-entry Advisory Board. Austin said he couldn’t have done it without Home for Good.

“We need more organizations like this, and more organizations ... need to be a concrete reform for returning citizens,” he said.

Austin said incarcerated men and women experience an unpleasant environment that make it difficult for the justice system to understand and properly reintegrate them back into society, and he hopes Home For Good can help change that.

Simmons said she also wanted to thank her administrative assistant, Elisa Hosey, for her engagement in connecting with area employers.