Community Partner

FreePass is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization, dedicated to breaking the cycle of recidivism by providing support that individuals need to successfully reenter society. FreePass connects individuals who have been incarcerated and impacted by the criminal justice system with vetted essential resources — including housing assistance, mental health services, employment support, and legal aid — to help them build stable lives following their release from prison.

Their main projects are compiling resources for an online app intended for those who are currently reintegrating into society, and a guidebook, intended for distribution inside prisons for people approaching release. These resources, specifically the guidebook, are intended to be accessible and align with Free Pass’s mission of supporting people in all different phases of reentry. Our collaboration with FreePass working on these comprehensive guides began in Spring 2025.

Michael Butler, creator of FreePass and director of Fountain Fund

Read our 2025 Community Partner Report.

Design Question

Our initial design question asked how we can increase the availability and accessibility of resources for those recently out of prison.

We knew the key outcome of our partnership with FreePass was to further the development of their print guidebook. In supporting the compilation of this guide, we realized the importance of the rhetoric and the voice of the guidebook. Many incarcerated individuals face an educational disparity and FreePass’s guidebook needs to be accessible to people of all levels of literacy.

With this information in mind, we refined our question to ask how we can best support the development of the guidebook with a focus on the availability and accessibility of resources for formerly incarcerated individuals regardless of their educational background.

Throughout the semester, we’ve become acutely aware of the rhetoric employed in the draft of the guidebook and intentional about our edits. To be effective, this project relies heavily on the specific wording and structure of the descriptions and instructions for each of the resources provided, and we’ve guided our contributions with the tenet of this new design question.

Strategic Thinking

Throughout the duration of this project, we contributed to the foundation of FreePass’s guidebook. Although at the time of writing the book it was still actively under development, we prioritized providing more general content suggestions that can be incorporated throughout the book, such as interactive reflection modules. In doing this, we allowed our contributions to be fluid and ever-evolving with potential further development by the FreePass team or a future semester of B:Social students. This was a decision informed by Creative Reaction Lab’s Equity-Centered Community Design Field Guide. This resource allowed us to more intentionally provide our feedback in the form of prototyping, since the FreePass project wasn’t necessarily out of the early draft stages. Meeting bi-weekly with the team at FreePass was a strategically valuable practice and served as an important tool in helping us stay aligned with and effectively meet our partner’s needs.

Our thought processes reflected the mission of FreePass and prioritized its cause of anti-recidivism rather than small-picture items. We utilized Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle method from his 2009 TedTalk, which encourages individuals to reflect on the “why,” “how,” and “what” of an organization. This allowed us to examine not just the surface level of what FreePass is doing, but look beyond at the fundamental issue that individuals going through reentry are not provided with necessary resources.

One of the team’s biweekly meetings with FreePass’s graphic and web designer Daniel DeRosato.

Co-Creation

Throughout our collaboration with the FreePass team, we maintained regular communication with the team, and as a result were able to get extensive feedback and ensure our work aligned with FreePass’ vision. Our community partner initially presented extensive guidance on their mission as an organization, the overall impact they want to have, and their plans for getting there. This meant our first goal was to discuss with the FreePass team how we could refine our involvement to best serve them. In doing so, we set up biweekly meetings with members of the FreePass team to review our progress on projects and seek continuous feedback. During these meetings, we facilitated ideation sessions, where we collaboratively brainstormed different ideas on how to contribute to the guidebook’s structure and function. This included initiatives to transform the project into a more interactive workbook that can be filled out before release from prison—for example, adding “end of chapter” questions to encourage readers to actively apply what was just learned from the workbook to their own situations.

This was a crucial step towards building trust with our partner and ensuring we were putting their mission first, rather than prioritizing our experiences or our suggested tasks. It was especially helpful to meet in-person for this brainstorming and planning as this allowed us to connect with the FreePass team more as people and really take in their stories and life experiences.

Impact

Throughout the course of our collaboration with FreePass, the compilation of the re-entry guide has progressed from an early draft to a more complete copy that is now ready for the visual design stage. In doing so, this project has fortified connections with organizations that provide the resources included in the guidebook. This has had the impact of creating a sort of network within FreePass that creates a community of resources for people to access, rather than a list of individualized and un-related organizations.

We have worked to format the guidebook in a more interactive way, incorporating features like end-of-chapter questions. This will allow users to better reflect on what they have learned from the guidebook and identify the next actionable steps needed for a successful reentry into society.

While the project as a whole is still in development, a large part of FreePass’ impact comes in the form of preparation. Our work with the FreePass team on the guidebook, turning it into a more interactive text and conducting outreach with the organizations within the guidebook, positions the project for success upon its completion, both in the launch of the app and in the publishing and distribution of the book behind prison walls. .

The creation of a story arc for FreePass’s digital communications to have consistent messaging and audience appeal.

Reflection + Next Steps

Our collaboration with FreePass has revealed the value of synthesizing our own ideas with not just the organization’s goals plans, but also their personal and professional insights.

The process of joining an organization’s cause and efforts is daunting, and while it often seemed challenging to wholly understand where they were in their process, it allowed for the basis of partnership to begin. We had to abandon our preconceived notions of the type of work this project would entail and instead attach ourselves to existing tasks and projects within FreePass. An area for improvement that we’ve identified is our coordination between ourselves and these various stakeholders in a less individualized way.

For future projects, we discussed the possibility of creating video content for the FreePass app that allows formerly incarcerated people to tell their stories and experiences with re-entry.

Above all, the value of our work with FreePass lies in education. This project has taught us about the resources that exist to aid in re-entry and the many setbacks and roadblocks that reduce their accessibility. This has expanded our own understanding of the prison-industrial complex and the justice system by highlighting the long term effects of incarceration after a sentence is served, and, in doing so, allowed us to become more empathetic and intentional in how we support those affected.

Spring 2025