Raise money for Education Justice Project
EJP is a vibrant community of incarcerated students, educators, formerly incarcerated individuals, and others who are committed to a more just and humane world. We believe that providing quality post-secondary education within prisons is an important step towards that vision.
Our Mission
The mission of the Education Justice project is to build a model college-in-prison program that demonstrates the positive impacts of higher education upon incarcerated people, their families, the neighborhoods from which they come, the host institution, and society as a whole.
What We Do
EJP is a comprehensive college-in-prison program based at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We offer programming in four main areas.
- We offer upper-division University of Illinois courses and extracurricular activities at Danville Correctional Center, a medium-security men’s prison about 45 miles from the Urbana-Champaign campus. The learning community that EJP instructors and students continually recreate at the prison is at the core of everything else that EJP does, and drives our other activities.
- Through our Reentry Resource Program, we produce reentry guides and other reentry resources, and distribute them to incarcerated individuals, family members, and service agencies across the state and beyond.
- Our Policy & Research division engages state and campus policy related to our work and runs a research group.
- Prison to Gown Pathway supports students who have personal experience of incarceration.
In addition, EJP produces resources for other higher education in prison programs, hosts a scholarship program, engages the local community through RIPPLE Effect, and supports EJP members in producing critical scholarship about prison education, as well as creative works.
We are committed to building an open, safe, gentle, inclusive learning environment within EJP. We believe that a rigorous and critical education program requires the cultivation of such an environment and that self-reflection is an important part of creating and sustaining such an environment. Our Inclusion Commitment guides our activities in this regard.
