The New York Consortium for Higher Education in Prison (NYCHEP) is a coalition of administrators, educators, and alumni from more than two dozen higher education institutions and organizations that offer college programming to over 1400 students in over 30 prisons and jails in New York State. NYCHEP embodies the shared knowledge of these institutions and provides a platform for programs to help each other grow, share best practices, and advocate for students.
Our mission is to educates students who enroll in college programs during incarceration, and to support their college enrollment, degree completion, and re-entry when they return to the community.
We share a vision of a society that decreases its use of prison without decreasing its commitment to justice; we see the expansion of access to higher education as a vehicle for this vision.
We value human dignity, equity, and opportunity. We want a world in which a person’s past does not determine their future.
Principles of Unity
1. Working across New York State to provide higher educational programs and support services to persons and their families impacted by the criminal legal system.
2. Supporting each other to deliver our programs effectively by sharing ideas, information, resources, and best practices.
3. Actively supporting practices and policies that advocate equity and justice for historically marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed peoples whether grounded in race, gender, sexual orientation or expression, religion, income, disability or legal system involvement.
4. Supporting a commitment to inclusive communication, transparency, and the expression of diverse viewpoints and possibly opposing ideas within our organization.
5. Working to expand in-person, quality higher education opportunities in prison and support services to persons and their families impacted by the criminal legal system within New York State and beyond.
Principles of Governance
Being mindful of the historical influences that have shaped current administrative practices, we lay out a framework for equitable and just governance within NYCHEP and its workgroups that rest on the following principles:
1. Servant leadership: (primary motivation is to serve, not to wield power). And its most important goal is to raise up new leadership. Not just do a competent job of leadership but to raise up and support others in doing the same.
2. “First-among-equals” facilitation role: The role of leaders within NYCHEP is to facilitate contributions from the members of the group, which includes of course our own personal contribution as an equal member of the group.
3. Shared and rotating leadership: The point of this is to draw out more leadership, give us more skills, and also to interact more with each other and get to know each other. It allows better networking, and encourages creativity and investment.
4. Representational Balance: We prize representational diversity along several axes including, but not limited to, organization size, geography, or funding structure, and we intentionally draw upon the expertise of previously incarcerated persons in our work.
5. Transparency-the open sharing of NYCHEP related information
*Banner image provided by Bard Prison Initiative, (c) Pete Mauney