Fresh Start
Entrepreneurship
Program Graduates
Turning Business Ideas Into Reality
The Fresh Start Entrepreneurship & Financial Capabilities Program is a collaboration among several entities with a shared goal of promoting economic empowerment for justice-involved individuals. Our 2024 inaugural cohort was launched in Boston in partnership with Reentry Survivors, a community organization providing entrepreneurship training for more than ten years, Harvard Law School, the Boston Mayor's Office of Returning Citizens, and SCORE, a resource partner of the U.S. Small Business Administration and mentor to America's small businesses. We look forward to working with many other community organizations and government agencies to make this program available to returning citizen entrepreneurs.
Program Goals
Fresh Start Entrepreneurship aims to provide justice-involved individuals with the education, mentoring, and legal assistance they need to start and run their own business. The Program's unique curriculum combines entrepreneurship training and money management skill development with individual coaching by experienced business mentors, certified financial coaches, and instructors with lived experience. To help remove barriers to mainstream banking and build credit, participants have access to an affordable bank account and free credit counseling services. Program graduates may also be eligible for a micro-grant to help them get started.
Business ownership represents an alternative path to income and wealth creation opportunities for justice-involved individuals. Fresh Start Entrepreneurship helps people turn their ideas into reality by providing essential business training, personal finance knowledge, individual mentoring, and access to affordable banking products and credit-building resources.
To learn more about our program and its impact, check out From Incarceration to Entrepreneurship featured in Harvard Law Today.
What People are Saying
CARMEN HALFORD
Clinical Instructor
Harvard Law School TLC
This kind of training program helps people who are at the very beginning of dreaming about their business. They’re just starting to figure out, how do I do this on a larger scale? How do I make this a sustainable income source for myself?
WAYNE LANE
Owner, Swtiching Lanes
Program Graduate
Dreaming after incarceration can be difficult. The Fresh Start program helped me out in way you couldn't imagine. My vision widened, and I decided I wanted to open a CDL driving school. Fresh Start helped me put that business plan into action.
CHARLES DAVIS
Aspiring Entrepreneur
Program Graduate
Best program in the city for returning citizens!
Tune in to the More Life The Reentry Podcast episode featuring our own Wayne Lane, Fresh Start program graduate, for an inspiring conversation about entrepreneurship after incarceration. Wayne shares his journey of rebuilding self-worth, rediscovering a sense of purpose, and embracing the belief that he deserved success. He also highlights how the Fresh Start program gave him the confidence and tools to pursue his dream of owning a business (to listen to the podcast, click on the image below).
Read our article Entrepreneurship After Prison: Fresh Start Business Ideas for more information about practical and affordable business ideas for returning citizens.