ENGAGING IN OUR COMMUNITY
Working to halve the Wisconsin prison population
WISCONSIN DECARCERATION PLATFORM
Our Mission statement
To create a platform that will help halve the Wisconsin prison population by 2030 by creating and maintaining a common online platform to amplify, unify, and aggregate people, organizations, and information, as well as disseminate communication and steps to end the incarceration problem in Wisconsin.
"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."
Frank Zappa
WHAT DOES OUR PROGRESS LOOK LIKE?
The MSOE Honors program has made substantial progress on the Wisconsin Online Decarceration Platform over the past 5 months. The Wisconsin Online Decarceration Platform will be a website that connects clients with service providers and provides service providers with a platform to interact with each other. The ultimate goal of the website is to halve the Wisconsin prison population by 2030. Although we did not contribute much to the programming of the site itself we focused on engaging our with community partners and service providers to see how we can further progress the WODP. Starting with our deductions from our precedent case studies, we found 5 different aspects the website could focus on: financial support, outreach, ease of access, partnerships, and promotion of resources.
We have gone to several expos, meetings, and events to get a better understanding of the issue we are tackling. We have worked with our stakeholders to foster a greater sense of community and to better understand what the users of the site want from it. Throughout our research and exploration, we have found opportunities to branch out as we have met multiple organizations who showed interest in our project and were willing to stay in contact with us. For example, we would like to add a community calendar aspect to our website that would allow service providers to import their personal events calendar into a communal calendar for all the service providers. This and notifications from the website were two of the top elements requested from our community that they would like to see on the website.
PROGRESS AMIDST THE PANDEMIC:
It is no surprise that our plans involving community engagement and working with our community partners were slowed because of COVID-19 but because our project is predominantly online there was a lot of added pressure to the actual content of the website, considering that events like Home to Stay etc. were cancelled. We took this time to do more research for content to put on the side and provide more access to these services on the website. We also have future plans to interview some recently decarcerated individuals. Our goal for this year will be accumulate more information and data to put on the website that will be of use to our viewership in this time.
