Frames Prison Program
At the age of nineteen, Dani Hedlund founded Brink Literacy Project, a nonprofit dedicated to using storytelling to empower people living on the brink. Over the last thirteen years, Brink has grown into one of the largest independently-funded literary nonprofits in the nation, with bases across the US and UK. Using her turning-point curriculum, Dani pioneered Brink’s Frames Program which is now taught in prisons in the US and Scotland. She is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of F(r)iction, a literature and art anthology at the heart of all Brink’s education courses. Since its inception in 2015, F(r)iction has risen to critical acclaim, becoming one of the fastest growing literary journals in the world. As an expert in literacy education and mission elevation, Dani also speaks regularly at universities, media outlets, and conventions, as well as writing for major publications about prison and education reform.
Our prison populations are rising at an alarming rate. But this is not due to rising crime. Instead, the revolving door of our justice system makes it nearly impossible for someone to stay out of prison upon release. Not only is this astronomically expensive, it also creates a cycle of incarceration that can trap generations.
By combatting three of the primary factors that contribute to incarceration and recidivism—education, job skill, and personal growth—Brink’s Frames program is taught in women’s prisons in the US and UK, using the comic book medium to court low-literacy and reluctant readers, empowering students to take ownership over their pasts, and helping them create a roadmap for the future.
But real change doesn’t only happen in the classroom. We are working on publishing stories from these courses to elevate them into the national conversation, sparking shifts in perception and policy change.
At Brink, we are keenly aware of the impact that positive stories can have. But we also know how negative stories can do great damage.
In marginalized communities—from incarcerated populations to those living below the poverty line—the stories people are often told about themselves are tales of failure and hopelessness. These internal narratives are compounded by limited access to education and far fewer opportunities.
And this is only getting worse. Poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and incarceration are rising, and people often struggle their entire lives to break this cycle.
This is the problem we seek to solve.
Since prisons are often the last step downward for a marginalized community, we focus on this population, to help them break the cycle not only for themselves, but for their families and the wider community.
But this problem isn’t just occurring at an individual level. It is being reinforced in a wider sense.
Thus, a significant factor that we seek to tackle is public perception and prison policy. Prisoners are often dehumanized and demonized, making it even harder for former inmates to reintegrate. These perceptions and policies around prison reform, rehabilitation, and reintegration must change in order to create lasting positive impact.
The Frames Prison Program is an 8-week graphic memoir course that uses the comic medium as a bridge to engage reluctant readers with reading and writing. Through the program, we work with individuals to develop their storytelling skills, promote literacy, spark critical thinking, and help them grow through self-reflection.
The curriculum is split between students engaging critically with reading materials and writing their own graphic memoir about an important turning point in their lives, with three goals at the heart of our efforts:
- Increasing Literacy Rates
- Decreasing Recidivism
- Shifting Public Perception
By helping students to transform a single turning point in their lives into a short graphic memoir, this program seeks to:
- Introduce storytelling as a means of positive self-expression
- Engage learners in creative and flexible education that unlocks their potential
- Strengthen reading and writing skills regardless of current proficiency
- Empower students to self-reflect, assess important past decisions, and set positive goals for the future
- Build students’ individual skillsets as they learn components of graphic design, writing, self-expression, analysis, and problem-solving skills that will help them achieve their own personal and economic goals
- Revolutionize the way literacy is approached and taught, especially within low-literacy, underrepresented populations
Our project serves three primary demographics: the incarcerated students, the families of those students, and the community at large.
Firstly, our direct impact always originates at the student-level. We work in the classroom to increase education levels while simultaneously facilitating the hard, personal work of helping students to re-evaluate their past, take accountability for their choices, and create a roadmap for a better future. This initial “spark of change” is nurtured after the class ends and once the student is released, to continue to stoke that fire for a successful life on the outside.
Second, as the most influential factor for a child’s development is their home environment, tackling literacy and recidivism rates to keep parents out of prison is a vital preventative measure for breaking the intergenerational cycle of incarceration.
Lastly, all our work—in the classroom, the press, and at policy level—is built around creating a thriving community at large. By decreasing recidivism and prison population rates, we’ll create a safer, more economically viable, and more just society—while also cutting down on astronomical government spending on incarceration.
- Elevating opportunities for all people, especially those who are traditionally left behind
Although all three dimensions are integral to our project’s outcomes, elevating opportunities for people traditionally left behind is the cornerstone of our work. As a large percentage of people in prison come from marginalized, low-income communities, we focus on closing the achievement gap for this often-overlooked population, particularly through education, career opportunities, and personal growth.
By combining these boots-on-the-ground efforts with our publishing network, we also elevate their stories to build awareness, change policy, and create understanding and empathy to spark cultural change.
Since our inception in 2007, Brink has been using storytelling to change lives. But when the librarian at a max-security women’s prison asked us in 2015 if we would develop a course for this underserved population, we embarked on the most rewarding expansion of our education work to date.
Knowing how closely linked literacy rates are to incarceration and recidivism, we developed a curriculum based on comics as a way to court low-literacy and reluctant readers. More importantly though, at the heart of every course, our programs delve into the students’ pasts to explore an important turning point. By helping students to critically evaluate their choices and create a pathway forward, we arm them with practical educational skills and spark personal shifts in identity vital to leading successful lives on the outside.
But as our courses grew, something beautiful happened: the stories from these classes not only reshaped the lives of the women who told them, but they also changed us, as teachers. We realized that if we could publish these stories, elevating them into the national conversation, we could help change the public perception around this population, thus sparking cultural and political shifts needed to combat growing incarceration.
The power of stories is something I experienced first-hand. Raised in a rural farming town, where graduating from high school and not developing a drug dependency was a feat few accomplished, my future felt bleak. That all changed when I discovered our school library. These books not only helped me to develop the essential literacy and education skills to graduate and receive a scholarship to university, but they also gave me something even more valuable: they changed the story I told about myself. I stopped believing the things I heard everyday—that I would never amount to anything, that I was stupid, that I didn’t matter. Instead, these stories inspired me to tell a different story: that I could do something special, if I just worked hard enough.
But I quickly realized that tens of millions of people live in marginalized communities and conditions that are far worse than mine and feel inescapable—the prison system, homeless shelters, low-income school districts.
I founded Brink at the age of nineteen, with the core mission to empower people “living on the brink” with the power and passion to change their stories.
I founded Brink at the age of nineteen. What I lacked in experience (and funding), I believed I made up in stubbornness, passion, and a desire to go out and change the world through action.
It was a rocky start. While I was working two jobs to support the nonprofit, I was also learning how to be a leader. And I did it terribly in the beginning—micromanaging, speaking more than listening, starting projects before they were ready.
But nothing teaches us more than making mistakes, humbling ourselves and rebuilding.
Now, our philosophy is centered around listening first and nurturing fantastic leaders who in turn nurture our instructors. My own example has shaped our nonprofit’s pathway—we have developed a unique approach to closing the achievement gap: combining the transformational power of education with the elevation of stories through widespread publishing. To my knowledge, no other nonprofit in this country has managed this on the same scale and with the same depth as Brink.
This programmatic development and experience leaves us poised at a tipping point. Having spent several years creating our program, establishing it in the US and the UK, and gathering data and feedback on its impact, we know it has the potential to revitalize prison education and contribute to decreasing recidivism.
The same passion that fueled me to start this organization is always present, but I also know that passion without action often dies, so everything we do is about keeping that transformational spark of change alive.
In November 2019, I was on stage speaking at a criminal justice conference in London when the event was targeted by a terrorist.
As I helped to usher event attendees to safety and kept pressure on a victim’s wounds, I remember thinking that this moment, this terrible moment, would be my greatest test as a leader.
But what came after was my real trial.
Later we learned that the attacker, the man who fatally stabbed two of our colleagues, was one of the ex-prisoner students in the room. This man sat in the front row of my workshop, saying all the right things. Then, five minutes later, he tried to kill as many of us as possible.
To say this shook my faith was an understatement. When the media frenzy began, the temptation to mimic that hate was strong, to question our impact, to let fear take over.
Instead, with my team’s incredible support, we didn’t back away. Instead, we redoubled our efforts to help incarcerated communities. We made the choice to focus not on the terror of that day, but instead on the bravery—of colleagues and students alike—who stood up against that darkness.
About a year into teaching in prison, R., a woman incarcerated for dealing heroin, joined my class. She was immediately disruptive, often verbally abusing me and her classmates.
As she told me, I could “take my personal growth and shove it.”
The prison librarian urged me to expel her, but I knew we couldn’t give up. Authority figures giving up on R. was likely a huge reason she was incarcerated.
Knowing that change does not come from the outside, I swallowed my pride, and focused on listening, on making sure R. felt safe and heard.
Then something changed. The next class, R. came in puffy-eyed. She opened up about her best friend’s daughter, who she had lived with for years before her incarceration. She’d just learned that the eleven-year-old girl had found her mother’s stash and mimicked what she’d seen her mother do.
If heroin could kill this sweet, innocent girl, R. said, she didn’t want anything to do with it. She refused to be a part of that cycle ever again.
Since then, R. has been an ideal student, but more than that: she is now a leader herself, encouraging other students to find a positive path forward.
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