Temple University, FBO The Inside-Out Center awarded grant
Temple University, FBO The Inside-Out Center awarded grant of $24,000.00.
The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program is an innovative higher education program that creates
opportunities for people inside and outside of prison to have transformative learning experiences together
that emphasize collaboration and dialogue and open up possibilities for creating wider, more systemic
change through civic agency and human connection.
Since the Program’s inception in 1997, The Inside-Out Center has provided 48 trainings for 727 instructors
from 34 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces (and seven instructors from the U.K., Denmark, Norway,
Australia and Mexico). These instructors have gone on to create 150+ partnerships between their
colleges/universities and local correctional institutions in order to offer Inside-Out courses.
One of the current goals of the organization is to enable Spanish-speaking professors in Mexico and other
Latin American countries to become part of Inside-Out.
This grant will expand the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program in Mexico and enable it
to reach other Latin American countries. The project will include the following:
translating the Inside-Out curriculum, training materials and class handouts to Spanish,
training the only current Inside-Out instructor in Latin Americamas a certified
Inside-Out trainer to reach Spanish-speaking professors,
certifying another Mexican professor who teaches in the Jalisco women’s state
penitentiary as an Inside-Out instructor through a week-long training program in Philadelphia,
implementing the first Inside-Out training in Mexico
The grant will initially benefit seven college professors in Mexico, who in turn will be able to teach InsideOut
college courses to approximately 20 students per semester. Thus, funding should enable at least 140
Mexican students (70 “inside” and 70 “outside”) to participate in Inside-Out in 2019.
The impact of this participation will be felt in Mexico and its southern neighbors. Each trained professor
will further promote the program at his or her university, in the prison system, and beyond. Having
program materials in Spanish and a Spanish-speaking certified trainer for Inside-Out will enable continued
growth and replication of the program long after the closure of this project (it will also enable expansion in
the U.S. with Spanish-speaking audiences).