Join us for an inspiring event as the Perryville cohort presents their capstone projects! Witness the culmination of their hard work and dedication as they showcase innovative solutions and skills acquired through our program. Don’t
For many troubled teens, a sentence to juvie feels like a sentence to fail. Statistically speaking — it is. 80-percent of juvenile offenders end up back behind bars within three years, less than 2-percent ever enroll in higher education. Prison is their most likely career path. Persevere doesn’t believe children should be chained to their past. The social justice organization has created a coding course, so incarcerated youth can engineer a future outside correctional facilities. It’s designed to turn delinquents into developers.
Persevere’s Nebraska cohort represents individuals who have demonstrated resilience, determination, and a commitment to positive change. Through the Persevere program, participants have received comprehensive support, including technology education, job training, mentorship, and access to resources aimed at facilitating successful reentry into society.
Persevere, a Tennessee-based business, has their coding program in four prisons, in the state of Arizona. The organization works with incarcerated people in four Arizona facilities, teaching computer coding to help reduce recidivism rates, according to Axios Phoenix.
She admits now that Persevere saw something in her that she didn’t, or could not. She fell in love with coding almost right away and discovered that the problems and solutions-based-thinking came naturally. It also helped her learn to speak again. In her own words: “I was just beginning to talk again because I had been a trauma-induced mute for two years. Coding helped me level up as a human being, helped me develop crucial communication skills.
“I was in a dark, angry place. It was an animalistic time. You sleep with your shoes on there. You step over bodies in the morning. But when I found Persevere – when Josh found me – it was like rocket fuel. I was ready to take off and do something great, if I was lucky enough to get out.” Jason found the classroom experience not only immensely engaging in itself, but to be an escape from “the madness around [him].”
At Persevere, our greatest asset is our staff. Our team cares deeply about their work, our participants and is a wealth of knowledge. Plus they are pretty amazing humans as well. Meet the faces of Persevere.
“When Persevere came to me,” she concludes, “I was literally depressed to the point where I didn’t want to wake up. My time was hard and that last year was the hardest. I got fired from a good job. Some officers and inmates were trying to get me off the yard. But then Persevere put a shield around me so no one could affect me. They couldn’t take Persevere away from me. I was part of that 22-women group and we hid in the arms of the program.” Beyond a job, then, coding provided her some kind of hope.
Our greatest asset is our staff. Particularly our instructors who are helping our folks gain valuable skills in coding. Not only are they top notch instructors, but they are pretty amazing humans as well. Check out the Instructor Spotlight series to get to know them.
Digital Dreams. In the spring of 2022, I stood at the crossroads of my life with a year and a half left in my prison sentence. It was then that I took a leap of faith and applied for acceptance into the Persevere Coding Program, not entirely certain of what lay ahead but driven by my tech-forward mindset. When I received that acceptance letter in May of 2022, I knew I was on the brink of something transformative. My journey into Full Stack Web Development, with a focus on MERN, began with anticipation, and I threw myself into the curriculum with unwavering commitment.
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© 2019-2023 PERSEVERE. All Rights Reserved.
