Next Chapter is a new partnership the chat start-up Slack has entered into with The Last Mile, a technology training program for incarcerated people, and $800,000 from the Kellogg Foundation, reports The Atlantic. Next Chapter will train and place three “returning citizens” inside Slack as “Quality Engineering Apprentices” and build a process to help them acculturate to one of the most successful start-ups of the last decade, with help from a small support team led by a formerly incarcerated man named Kenyatta Leal. The apprenticeship is split into three parts over a year: Roughly four months at the start-up boot camp Hack Reactor, four months of training, and then four months on the job, after which Slack may hire an apprentice, or help them get a job at another tech company.
Everyone involved with the program believes that if they can make it work at Slack, other companies in technology and far beyond might also begin to hire more men and women who’ve paid their debts to society. The program was announced amid a raucous wave of applause as John Legend, Leal, comedian Robin Thede, and Slack’s CEO Stewart Butterfield took the stage. More than 100 Slack employees have visited California’s San Quentin prison to meet and mentor people enrolled in The Last Mile’s coding program. Butterfield offered up his company as the test case for getting prison-trained coders into high-growth start-ups, something that has not worked yet. “I don’t want to say: This is it. This is a very experimental approach and obviously we hope the experiments work,” he said. “But even to the extent we are successful, which is providing pretty amazing opportunities for a relatively small number of people, we need to create a larger number of opportunities for people. I say we, but I mean us, the country.”