5 Questions with Shannon Ross of The Community

What is The Community?

The Community is a 7-year-old nonprofit that addresses the effects of the criminal legal system with two arms: Pre-entry and Correcting the Narrative. Pre-entry leverages our ever-growing connection with half the Wisconsin prison population (with access to over 30,000 more incarcerated people nationwide) to provide them with every type of resource, encouragement, and now training to return to society as successfully as possible. Our Correcting the Narrative campaign showcases the successes, humanity, and agency of people with criminal records. Ultimately, we seek to bring society and the system-impacted community exactly where they need each other to be.

What is one thing you hope to be able to bring into the world through your work with The Community?

We hope to foster stronger communities all over through innovative, widely collaborative, human-centered efforts to access the untapped talent of people with criminal records and the untapped empathy and understanding of society towards system-impacted people.

What is the most rewarding part of the work you do?
Knowing we are taking big swings at the roots of issues plaguing our communities, and working with incredible human beings who want to address these issues in ways that revolve around lived experience, technology, art, humility and high-quality data. I am immensely grateful for Adam Procell, Eli Rivera, Ruben Gaona, and Kaleigh Atkinson for the great groundwork we've laid the past year and the comprehensive scalable model we are building.

You’ll be a part of the upcoming Correcting the Narrative event, which is centered on innovative approaches to criminal justice reform. Why should people come to this event?
People should come to this event because we will cover — in the presentation and Q and A portion — why the criminal legal system is destructive to EVERYONE in society, why our current approach to dealing with people who violate the law is the equivalent of throwing our wallets at scary noises in the dark, and an innovative, widely-collaborative, effective way of addressing the problem.

What does it mean to ’socialize with purpose’ (our motto) for you?

As a natural introvert who simply plays an extrovert on TV (so to speak), socializing with purpose has always been my strong inclination. I don't have to get something out of any given social encounter, but I don't want any to just be acts of boredom or thumb-twiddling. Having spent 17 years in prison, I understand the value of time and we all have only so much in this life to spend as fruitfully as possible each day. So when I socialize, I want to come away feeling like I really know the person I just spoke to and how we can help each other's journeys and leverage each other's strengths far beyond our fears and weaknesses.