Resilience Education expands its Business School partnerships to the Wharton School to provide business education to incarcerated individuals
Resilience Education | Wharton WORKS: An Initiative to Empower Incarcerated Individuals with Business Education
Charlottesville, April 21, 2023- Resilience Education, a long-time leader in bringing business education to incarcerated learners through partnerships with leading business schools, is pleased to announce its new partnership with the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. This spring, 16 MBA students taught cases within Resilience Education's flagship business curriculum to 25 incarcerated learners at the State Correctional Institution - Chester (SCI Chester) just outside of Philadelphia.
Wharton MBA instructors were provided a unique opportunity to teach in the Little Scandinavia housing unit SCI Chester, a unit that incorporates ideas and concepts from Scandinavian prisons focused on rehabilitation and reintegration. This partnership is led by the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, Norwegian Correctional Service (Kriminalomsorgen), the Swedish Prison and Probation Service (Kriminalvården), Drexel University, and the University of Oslo.
“If Little Scandinavia can help with sustaining a re-entrant’s success in the community, then the program is a win. Part of the program involves partnering with community and educational powerhouses like Resilience and Wharton,” said SCI Chester Superintendent Gina Clark. “These partnerships and the workshops they offer can only add to the substance of what the vision is for a unit of this design.”
Traditionally, business schools have not addressed the interplay between the problem of incarceration and the business world. However, as more MBA students seek careers in social impact, business schools are investing in this space to attract and engage their students. The program, called Resilience Education | Wharton WORKS, has a dual impact model - to provide direct education to justice-impacted individuals and expose MBA students and future business leaders to the intersection of business and social impact. This partnership shows Wharton’s leadership role in legitimizing reentry, creating pathways to meaningful careers, and promoting positive employment outcomes for this community. Wharton joins Resilience Education’s partnerships with the Darden School of Business and Columbia Business School to create a broader movement in the business world to understand the problem of incarceration and the unique role businesses can play.
The Resilience Education | Wharton WORKS program is led by Wharton’s Professor Damon Phillips, who has long been a champion of social impact and entrepreneurship within the business world. “Providing business education to incarcerated individuals is an important step in breaking the cycle of poverty and incarceration that affects so many communities in the United States and specifically in the Philadelphia area,” said Professor Phillips. “I am excited for this partnership that allows our MBA students, as future leaders, to both teach and learn from incarcerated learners.”
Wharton will follow the same model with a larger MBA teaching group and the full Resilience Education curriculum in fall 2023.
Resilience Education’s curriculum not only focuses on business skills but also is deeply rooted in the Socratic teaching method, part of leading business schools' case method curriculum. As Tierney Fairchild C’89 and Resilience Education’s co-founder and Executive Director, says, “It’s crucial for our incarcerated learners’ educational value - they develop confidence and critical thinking as they discuss and debate their opinions of the protagonist’s decisions. No matter what career they pursue post-release, we believe that it is this experience that will ground them to navigate challenges and opportunities they encounter.”
Throughout her career, Tierney has sought to connect business education to populations who usually do not get access to it - first in school turnaround leadership and now with incarcerated learners - drawing on her own experience as both an MBA graduate and Ph.D. in Education. And as a Penn Graduate, she is thrilled to bring Resilience Education to Wharton to grow a new generation of alumni leaders who will make a positive impact on society.
The Resilience Education | Wharton WORKS program is a testament to the power of collaboration between academic institutions and nonprofit organizations. By drawing on Resilience Education’s experience of working across business schools and corrections over the last 12 years, Wharton was able to accelerate this work’s implementation and maximize its impact. Resilience Education wants to enable other business schools to implement their own version of Resilience Education | Wharton WORKS to expand the business world’s positive impact on the lives of incarcerated and reentering individuals as they educate future business leaders.
About the Wharton School:
Founded in 1881 as the world’s first collegiate business school, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is shaping the future of business by incubating ideas, driving insights, and creating leaders who change the world. With a faculty of more than 235 renowned professors, Wharton has 5,000 undergraduate, MBA, executive MBA, and doctoral students. Each year 13,000 professionals from around the world advance their careers through Wharton Executive Education’s individual, company-customized, and online programs. More than 104,000 Wharton alumni form a powerful global network of leaders who transform business every day. For more information, visit www.wharton.upenn.edu.
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About Resilience Education:
Resilience Education is a nonprofit organization that partners with business schools across the United States to deliver business and financial curriculum to incarcerated learners and support their careers post-release through mentorship and business networks. in 6 facilities in 3 states. Post-release, Resilience Education continues to partner with business schools as former instructors and formerly incarcerated graduates join Resilience Education’s professional network to advance their careers and lives through mentorship and other programming. Founded in 2012, with the Darden School of Business, Resilience Education has served thousands of incarcerated individuals, helping them to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in the business world.
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The launch of the Resilience Education | Wharton Works program in SCI Chester could not have been without the generous support and work of the following individuals: Supt Clark of SCI Chester, all the officers in the Little Scandinavian unit, Jordan Hyatt, John Fantuzzo, Marie DiLeonardo, the pilot MBA instructors and incarcerated learners, the Wharton team (Professor Damon Phillips, Dean Erika James, Deputy Dean Nancy Rothbard, Ellen Furxhi, Vice Dean Lori Rosenkopf and Mary Seng), Tierney Fairchild and Bianca Bellino of Resilience Education, and the Coalition for Equity and Opportunity at Wharton.