Jeremy Bouman

What is your position at RISE? How did you get to this point?

How did I get to this point? That’s a loaded question. I currently serve as the Founder and CEO of RISE. Before we launched RISE, I headed up the Nebraska chapter of Defy Ventures. Prior to that, I worked at Creighton University. During my years at Creighton, I volunteered through my church at the Douglas County Jail. I went into the jail every week to mentor incarcerated men one on one while they were waiting on their sentencing. Once they were  released to the community or sent to prison I would get a new assignment. During that time, I got to know a lot of people trapped in the system cycling in and out of incarceration. I would attend their sentencing and sit with their family. Their children would be sitting in court,  watching their father get sentenced to sometimes 8-10-15 years or more, and I was looking at these kids and realizing that they were going to be teenagers or adults by the time their father came home from prison.  

The statistic that hits me in the face is that 70% of kids with incarcerated parents will follow in their footsteps. 

How do we stop that trend and break the cycle of generational incarceration? We have a broken system of outdated laws that incarcerate people for excessively long periods of time. When people get out, how do we help them stay out? I really believe a key to lowering recidivism is employment and job creation through entrepreneurship.

I spent time in the jail praying with guys, leading Bible studies and many days, just listening so they had someone to talk to without judgement. A lot of the men I mentored were very entrepreneurial. They would bring business plans to our meetings and had a lot of questions about entrepreneurship and business. I remember looking at a business plan from an Omaha gang leader that was kind of like a boys and girls club with a social enterprise component built around low-rider bike culture. It was well thought out and realistic, a way to help the community and make a small profit at the same time. I began to see entrepreneurship as a tool to break incarceration cycles. If a felony background creates challenges to employment upon release, why not use your entrepreneurship skills to create your own legal job? In 2009 I went to Texas and saw the prison entrepreneurship program, a program run by Catherine Hoke who started Defy in 2010. In the back of my mind, I thought, it would be so cool to have something in Nebraska like what she was doing in Texas and later on the coasts, bringing in business leaders and students to teach entrepreneurship as re-entry preparation.

While I was at Creighton, I saw that Defy was coming to Nebraska as the third state to have the program. I was blown away by that. Catherine and I reconnected, and she hired me to run the Nebraska program. Working with men trapped in the system, I had become more and more passionate about prison reform. The Omaha philanthropic community is so generous, and their commitment to innovative problem solving around social issues brought the program to the community. Defy was serving these huge prison systems in New York and California and making some impact, but I just kept imagining the type of impact we could make running a similar program in Nebraska where there are 5,400 people incarcerated in the whole state prison system. There are prisons in California that have the entirety of the Nebraska prison population in one facility. I truly believe we can move the needle here over time because we can get our arms around the problem in Nebraska more easily than bigger state prison systems. When I worked in New York in social services—I’m from New York—I felt that we’d do good work, but you’d never see communities make deep, lasting change. You’d see some individuals and families transform their lives for the better, but I think here we have an opportunity to see the ripple effects of individuals, families, and communities changing for the better in a sustainable way.

The equal focus of our mission at RISE, in addition to training and preparing people for successful re-entry, is preparing the community to welcome those people coming out of prison with open arms and opportunities. 93% of people in Nebraska prisons are coming home, and 66% will return to Nebraska communities in the next three years. When returning citizens re-enter well and have access to employment, public safety improves. It costs $36,000 a year to incarcerate one person for one year in Nebraska, and the average sentence is three years. One in three returning citizens currently go back to prison within three years. Not to mention, Nebraska is the second most overcrowded prison system in the country. Do the math – mass incarceration is not just a social justice issue, but an economic one. The cost for RISE participants to take our six-month re-entry program while incarcerated is about $800 per person. The social and financial return on investment in a program like RISE is off the charts. 

Mass incarceration is one of the few issues our divided country can agree on right now. The House and Senate overwhelmingly passed the First Step Act, the largest prison reform legislation in my lifetime, which opens a door to some policy solutions, including easing mandatory minimum sentences. The bill also allows “earned time credit” for incarcerated people participating in vocational and rehabilitative programs. RISE was built for this moment and is exactly the type of program this legislation points to as a successful intervention. I hope to see Nebraska adopt aspects of this legislation at the state level to lessen the overcrowding. What if incarcerated Nebraskans could receive time credits and parole supervised release for participating in and completing our RISE program? Our program outcomes dictate that this option should be explored. 

The statistic that hits me in the face is that 70% of kids with incarcerated parents will follow in their footsteps. 

What does your average day look like at RISE? How does your work impact others?

Every day is different. I try to focus my efforts externally – fundraising, working with my board, recruiting volunteers, speaking to groups about our program, trying to be visible in the community around our work. Some days it is staff management and operations. Many days I’m leading prison events or teaching and facilitating class time at the 7 prisons we serve. I spend as much time as I can with our program participants both in prison and when they come back to the community. The days are always very different, but it’s all very hands on with people we’re working to help. I’m blessed to work with the RISE staff who are all amazing and mission driven.

How would you describe the people closest to you in Omaha?

The people closest to me care deeply about this community and share a desire for the community to be better. There’s a lot of amazing people who are doing innovative work to solve community problems across the spectrum of industries—whether its artists, people working in social services, the business community, everyone is working to improve the lives of people in Omaha and using their gifts to serve. There is incredible creativity here and the work is not done in a void but done collaboratively. There’s a beautiful ecosystem built around mutual connections and introductions, and I’m constantly wowed and inspired by the new people I meet.

What, in your heart, drives you to do what you do? What is your connection to this community?

My faith drives a lot of what I do. I grew up in New York City, and my dad is a pastor. He would take me around on calls with him to nursing homes and he used to take me to Riker’s Island when I was 7 or 8 years old. I remember visiting with incarcerated people there, and we’d talk sports, we’d talk about my little league team, my dad would pray with them, and they would often laugh and cry. They were people struggling and trying to do their best.

Volunteering at the jail and working in social services illuminated for me the need for prison reform, and highlighted the injustices of the system in terms of the rampant racism, unjust laws, and how poverty is treated like a crime. Many of my closest relationships, people I love and care about, are people I met while they were incarcerated and their families. I became passionate about the issue when it became personal. This is why bringing the community to prison is such a big part of RISE. I want our participants to know their strengths and gifts, and tap into them fully in a way that opens up a life they didn’t believe they could have or that their upbringing told them they couldn’t have.

What have you learned from the men and women who have gone through the RISE program?

Man, they teach me so much. They’re so resilient. Their resilience is why I know they’ll be successful in business. They wake up in prison and they come to our class 3 times a week over a 6 to 8 month period—just showing up a lot of days takes a lot.

One thing I hadn’t anticipated is how many people drop out of our program because they’re afraid to succeed. We have people quitting a week before they graduate. If you’ve never known success, you don’t know what happens next, and it’s scary. You get to a point where you self-sabotage. It’s hard getting people to believe in their own good shit, that if they get that W, there’s more to come and something to build on. If your self-confidence is low and you’ve never tasted any success, it’s terrifying. We’ve had to add components to the early part of our curriculum to address that fear of success. I had some blind spots about that.

I’ve learned that the entrepreneurial spirit in our prisons is strong. I love the idea of redemptive entrepreneurship. Our program participants have used their entrepreneurial skills in the past to lead gangs or sell drugs and ended up in the system. We celebrate their entrepreneurial mindset and work with them to transform it into a legal context. They own their past and take responsibility, and now have a strong desire to give back. Their business plans reflect that. We help them launch businesses that create profit and change.

What are some of your hobbies? When you’re not at RISE, what do you enjoy doing?

This is my life. To me, vocationally, my hobbies are the weekends when we get our graduates together and we have alumni association meetings. Being in the lives of our graduates is such a gift. I love being a dad and a husband. My family is such a blessing to me. I like to read, I like music, books, movies, travel, and you know, building relationships and friendships with other people in the community. Through this work I’ve found my tribe in the community and a lot of people I enjoy spending time with. RISE Volunteers have become like a family. We’ve had 450+ unique volunteers come into prison. RISE events bring together the kind of people I like spending time with. People that are open-minded, empathetic, curious, who can love others without judgment—when you draw people together who are wired in these certain ways, you have a beautiful community. We’ve helped that community get jobs, develop friendships, and there’s really no age range, sector, or field that it focuses on. Do you want to serve? Those are the people I’m drawn to. They’re nice people to be around. Fostering that community and being a part of it has been a joy for me, too.

What can the Omaha community do to help RISE continue to serve its community?

Hire RISE graduates. Provide employment opportunities and access to returning citizens. Volunteer as a coach or mentor. Come to a RISE event, whether in prison or in the community. Please donate to RISE if you can. Reentry requires a broad community response to support people coming out of incarceration.

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