Partnerships vs. Charity — Empowering Incarcerated Leaders: A First-Person Reflection for the Launch of The New Wave

By Ivan Kilgore, Founder, United Black Family Scholarship Foundation (UBFSF)

For years, I’ve sat inside these concrete walls watching how well-intentioned organizations come in and out of our lives—bringing programs, lectures, or “rehabilitative opportunities” that often look good on paper but rarely shift the actual conditions of our confinement. From the outside, these initiatives seem benevolent. They’re framed as charity. They’re described as services for the underserved. On grant reports, they present incarcerated people as “recipients,” “targets,” or “stakeholders.”

But the language obscures a deeper truth: in most spaces that involve prisons, power flows in one direction—never toward us.

As the incarcerated founder of the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation (UBFSF), I’ve spent more than two decades observing and living inside these dynamics. And if there is one lesson I wish every nonprofit, university, grassroots coalition, and philanthropic institution would understand, it is this: There is a world of difference between a partnership and charity. And for incarcerated communities, that difference determines whether we evolve into leaders, or remain perpetual dependents of systems that were never designed to empower us.

The Problem With Charity: When Good Intentions Reproduce Harm

Charity, as it is traditionally practiced in prison settings, follows a predictable pattern: The organization enters with all the authority. The incarcerated people sit, receive, and absorb information. The curriculum, the goals, and the metrics are predetermined.

The organization benefits—from grants, reports, publicity, or a “service-learning experience.” The incarcerated participants leave with short-term knowledge but no long-term agency. In this model, we are not seen as creators of knowledge. We are instruments, proof that a program is needed, evidence that a problem is being addressed, or worse, “success stories” that can be photographed and filed away in a portfolio.

Meanwhile, the deeper structures—those that choke autonomy, leadership, and innovation remain untouched. When charities operate with this one-directional power flow, even unintentionally, they replicate the very ideologies that contribute to mass incarceration: disempowerment, dependency, and exclusion from civic life.

I’ve lived the consequences of this dynamic. I’ve watched programs come and go, offering temporary relief but leaving no path for real transformation. In many cases, they create more harm than good because they reinforce the message that incarcerated people need to be “helped,” not that we have the capacity to lead. That message is a lie—and one that keeps far too many of us stuck.

Where Charity Ends and Partnership Begins

Thankfully, not all organizations approach incarcerated communities through a charity lens. Some step into prisons with humility, reciprocity, and a commitment to co-creation. These are organizations that see incarcerated people not just as participants but as collaborators, thinkers, teachers, strategists, leaders, and community assets.

One such organization is the Alliance for California Traditional Arts (ACTA) and their groundbreaking Social Justice Theater Program. Years ago, while housed in maximum security at Salinas Valley State Prison, I participated in their theatrical workshops. Their approach was unlike anything I had seen. Through role-playing, dialogue, embodied storytelling, and honest conversation, they did more than “teach” us. They asked us to explore how power operated in our lives, between incarcerated people, staff, authority figures, and even within ourselves.

For the first time, a program did not treat us as empty vessels. Instead, we were encouraged to interrogate our agency, our relationships, and our capacity to shape our environment. That shift, from being taught to being empowered, changed everything for me. It was the first time I realized what a true partnership looks like. But even ACTA had to be “granted access.” And the fact that empowerment requires permission reveals just how fragile our agency is, and how desperately the system tries to contain it.

Sitting at the Table: Why Decision-Making Power Changes Lives

I often tell our student volunteers and partners: I was not taught to lead inside prison, I learned to lead in spite of prison. There were no classes on program design, nonprofit management, fundraising, digital literacy, remote work, board governance, communication protocols, conflict resolution, or community organizing. 

Everything I learned, I learned through trial and error, many errors. I made mistakes. I crossed boundaries. I failed to formalize policies. I misunderstood professional expectations. There were days when I was trying to build an organization from a prison cell with no mentor, no internet access, and no one to model what leadership could look like from inside.

In here, the curriculum is always the same: trauma, addiction, anger management, and relapse prevention. Important topics, yes, but they focus on controlling behavior, not building power. They teach compliance, not autonomy. They encourage self-regulation, not self-determination. And that’s the problem. True transformation requires more than emotional healing. It requires structural empowerment.

When incarcerated people have the opportunity to sit at real decision-making tables, to lead programs, develop ideas, manage volunteers, and build community-based initiatives, we develop skills that prison was designed to suppress. Skills such as strategic thinking, leadership, ownership, accountability, innovation, civic engagement, and an empowered sense of identity

This is why the UBFSF exists. This is why we started The New Wave. And this is why partnerships, not charity, form the foundation of our work.

The Early Years: Doors Opened, but Never Fully

Back in 2014, when I first launched the UBFSF from prison, I saw this dynamic clearly. Professors would invite me to lecture their students, but only about crime, punishment, or the prison system. They wanted insight, but not collaboration. They valued my story, not my skills. They would ask questions, but rarely ask what I wanted to build.

Similarly, nonprofits running self-help groups would train me to facilitate their curriculum, film us to show “impact,” and highlight our participation in their reports. But they never taught me: how to run my own program, how to write a grant, how to recruit volunteers, how to evaluate outcomes, how to scale an initiative, or how to build a nonprofit.

The message was clear: We were good enough to serve as examples, but not good enough to co-create solutions.

And yet, inside these walls, I knew dozens of men and women with the intellectual capacity, creativity, and determination to lead entire departments of higher education, social reform movements, or national nonprofits, if only given access to the knowledge, mentorship, and infrastructure everyone else takes for granted.

What we lacked wasn’t talent. What we lacked was partnership.

A Different Vision: Building Power From the Inside Out

Despite the barriers, I refused to surrender to the culture of dependency. I had been an entrepreneur and business major before my incarceration, which gave me a different perspective. I understood organizational dynamics, systems-building, and economic development. I knew that if change was going to happen, it would have to start from within.

So I doubled down on my education—studying nonprofit management, leadership development, governance, and community organizing. I practiced writing grant proposals by hand. I refined my communication skills through correspondence. I sought mentors through letters. I learned how to manage teams remotely, using only the tools available in a prison cell. And slowly, the organization grew.

Today, I’m proud to say that the UBFSF partners with a network of forward-thinking professors, universities, and social entrepreneurs around the world. One of our major partners, social entrepreneur Amber Melanie Smith, collaborated with us to launch the Nonprofit Coaching & Leadership Training Program for America’s Incarcerated, an unprecedented initiative taught by incarcerated leaders for incarcerated leaders.

The first modules are now live on Edovo, accessible to 1.4 million tablet users across the United States. This is what partnership looks like: reciprocal learning, shared power, co-creation, co-governance, mutual respect, and the belief that incarcerated people are not charity cases. We are architects in the fight against systemic racism and poverty

Why This Matters for Nonprofits, Universities, and Funders

As we launch The New Wave, we want to equip organizations with practical guidance for developing programs that affirm the leadership and intellectual contributions of incarcerated people. If you are serious about equity, here is the truth: You cannot dismantle systemic racism while keeping the people most affected by it out of the decision-making process.

Real partnership requires sharing power, co-designing programs, compensating incarcerated contributors, crediting their work, protecting their intellectual property, offering leadership opportunities, and listening to the expertise that comes from lived experience. Anything less becomes charity. And charity cannot transform systems.

A Call to Action: Join the New Wave

This article marks the beginning of a new chapter—not only for me, but for the thousands of incarcerated leaders, writers, thinkers, and visionaries whose ideas deserve to shape the world beyond these walls. If you are a university professor, nonprofit leader, or funder reading this, I invite you to ask yourself:

• Are you offering charity—or building partnerships?
• Are you teaching us—or learning with us?
• Are you relieving symptoms—or redistributing power?

The New Wave is here to challenge you, support you, and work with you as we reshape what justice-centered education can look like, when incarcerated people are not an afterthought, but the driving force.

To learn more about our programs, visit: https://UBFSF.org/nonprofit-conference

To support our work, donate by texting UBFSF to 44-321.

To join our team, reach out. We’re building a movement, and movements require all

of us.

 

Inside these walls, leadership is not given—it is forged. And when organizations choose partnership over charity, that leadership has the power to transform communities on both sides of the prison gate.

Welcome to The New Wave.