Breaking the Cycle: Televerde’s Mission for Second Chances w/ Kellie Walenciak

Jackie - 00:00:10:

Welcome to season 10 of Diversity Beyond the Checkbox, proudly presented by the the Diversity Movement and part of the Living Corporate Network. I'm your host, Jackie Ferguson, author, business leader, and human rights advocate. In this podcast, we're diving deep into the stories of trailblazers, game changers, and glass ceiling breakers who share insights and professional success and personal development. Thank you for being part of this amazing community. Enjoy the show. Thanks for listening to Diversity Beyond the Checkbox. My guest today is Kellie Walenciak, Global Head of Marketing and Communications for Televerde, a preferred global revenue creation partner supporting marketing, sales, and customer success for B2B businesses around the world. Kellie, thank you so much for being here.

Kellie - 00:01:05:

Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Jackie - 00:01:07:

I'm so excited to get into this conversation. Kellie, let's start with talking about Telaverde. Tell us about Telaverde and how you got involved with them.

Kellie - 00:01:17:

Okay. I love telling the Televerde story. So Televerde is actually a very unique company. It was started in 1994 out in Arizona. But it started in Arizona women's prison. So our founder, who's the name of Ron Bell, he was ministering with an Episcopal Ministry organization to women who had been incarcerated. And in a moment that he calls divine intervention, he says that he thought to himself, women would be far more prepared if when they're released from prison, they actually have a skill that they can use to get a job and then support themselves and their families. So out of that, Telaverde was born. Through his church, he met the gentleman who would go on to be our CEO for the next 25 years and really get Telaverde to the company that it is today. His name was Jim Hooker. He was a former IBM executive who very before his time in that he was kind of tired of corporate America and he was looking for something meaningful. So it was long before purpose was on anyone's radar. And I don't even know that he would have called it that. But that's what he set out when he saw this model was an opportunity to use business to generate profits for clients, but also to change the lives of incarcerated women. I love the fact that it was started in 1994, because just to kind of put some context around that, that was the same year that the tough on crime bill was passed. So here you had the mood of the country was very much lock them up and throw away the key. And there were these two men in an Arizona women's prison who were saying, you know what? I think they deserve a fair shot. And that's exactly what they gave. So over the next 25 years under Jim's leadership, the company would grow to about 650 700 employees worldwide. We are global. And 65% of that workforce is women who are incarcerated in now five U.S. State-run prison facilities. So since our inception, we've had over 4,000 women graduate our program. We use the term graduate when a person, when a woman goes through our program and then is released into society. We also have a nonprofit foundation, which we launched in 2020 to kind of pick up where the business leaves off and provide those added safety nets that are so critical to successful reentry. So consider life skills training, financial literacy, job placement, career readiness, a really, really robust program that they go through. And the Televerde Foundation stays with them throughout their journey with transitional mentorship, professional mentorship, higher education opportunities, all of that. So it really is this holistic program. That, as I said, is not only changing the lives of these women and their families, but is also driving really, really incredible results for the clients who work with us. And we specialize in inside sales and demand generation and inbound customer support. So the women are learning everything there is to know about business and sales and marketing and really building these careers from the ground up while they're incarcerated.

Jackie - 00:04:43:

That's amazing, Kellie Tell us a little about how you got involved with Televerde Foundation.

Kellie - 00:04:49:

Yeah. Well, I was working for a high-tech company, Avaya. I probably was with them about 12 years when we had gotten a new CMO in who really wanted to support sales by building up our sales funnel. I was her communication partner and also the head of employee engagement at the time. And we did what you would normally do is we put out an RFP and different companies bid. And it was Televerde came in. We weren't aware of the incarcerated model. It wasn't until our CMO flew out to Arizona to meet with Jim Hooker, as I said, the CEO. And he took her out to the prisons and she met with these women. She's very British and they typically don't wear their heart on their sleeves like we tend to do in America. And when she came back and she called me, she said, I can't even put into words what I experienced. She was so moved and so inspired by what she saw in that prison and really blown away by. Their knowledge of, at the time, of Avaya's products and services. And I always remember her saying, if our salespeople knew Avaya products the way that these women did, we would have revenue growth quarter after quarter. And that was a pretty powerful statement for a CMO to make. So anyway, it was through that that I was first introduced to Televerde. I wrote a blog with her just talking about Televerde and the business model. They came into Avaya. They did extraordinary work. I would have loved the opportunity to work for them, but I never thought it was possible because I wasn't moving from the East Coast and they're very happy in Arizona. But my CMO actually ended up becoming the CEO and she brought me with her.

Jackie - 00:06:36:

Wow.

Kellie - 00:06:36:

Yes, yes. And she's since retired. So I've been with Televerde five years, starting in a corporate communications position, heading up social media, PR, and internal comms. And then slowly kind of content marketing came under me and then marketing. So it's been quite a journey, as I said, five years. It's not to say that there are some days I don't want to pull my hair out, but I think I'm very grounded in the mission. We're very clear on our why, very much behind it. And I think it's been really rewarding for me to work with a company that really is balancing profit and purpose. Truly in every sense of the world. So, and i also think too, um from a DENI perspective, inclusive really does mean everybody and that's powerful for me.

Jackie - 00:07:45:

Absolutely, We can certainly Kellie jump into that because that's one of the question that i had, you know, many organization have made diversity important especially over the last four years, but we're not always connecting diversity of experience with benefits to the organization, right? So when we think about people that are justice involved, what are some of the characteristics of justice involved people that benefits businesses that we're not even thinking about?

Kellie - 00:08:01:

Okay, well, it's a great question. And the first thing, because I had a lot going on in my head while I was listening to you, but the first thing I would say is the stigma of incarceration. It's very real and it informs our perception of people who have been incarcerated. So we've been told that people who are incarcerated, they don't want to work, they're lazy, they want handouts, they're not capable of any type of job other than a low skill job. So first is kind of sifting through that is that The men and women in prison, they're intelligent. They're smart. They want to learn. And I haven't met one person looking for a handout. They're looking for a hand up. You know, nobody, when they're a child, aspires to be say to a child, what do you want to do when you grow up? No one says, I want to go to prison, right? So there are a series of events that happen that, you know, kind of detour people, if you will. Whether that's a failure within the family, a failure within the community, I would argue it's probably a combination of failings across the board. A lot of times, too, with incarceration, we see it's generational. So if you're born to a parent or two parents who are incarcerated, the odds are very much that you, too, will be incarcerated. So you have kind of getting through that stigma. But what I've also learned about people who are incarcerated is when you hire them, they have unique perspectives. They're really gritty. They don't give up easily. So they want to prove to you that they can do it. But it's also something about them. They want to prove it to themselves. Because for a lot of these people, they've never had opportunity. They've never been told that they can. So they grab hold of these opportunities with everything that they've got in order to dig in and really produce extraordinary results. And I'll tell you, the Society of Human Resources Management has done extensive work in partnership with the Charles Koch Institute, where they've actually talked to HR leaders who are supportive of second-chance hiring and have asked them, what have you seen? And it's higher retention rates. It's better commitment. Because again, I think when they come to you, there's a tendency to want to stick with you. There's a loyalty there that you don't always see with employees who are perhaps not incarcerated. So from my perspective... You're getting traits, a number of traits that we look for. When you interview somebody, you're hoping for maybe three of the 10 or four of the 10 or whatever. You're getting them across the board and then some. And I joke around with the ladies all the time because we talk a lot about stigma. I'm very aware of stigmas. But one of the stigma is, as you get older, we become more set in our ways and probably don't want to learn as much as we used to maybe when we were in our 20s. And again, this is another stigma that's kind of breaking. Because... I'm witnessing women who are in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. Eager to just take on more and learn more and just consume a vast amount of knowledge in a very short amount of time. So again, you're getting this continuous learning that is so important. You know, I know they say the future of work isn't about what you know, it's what you're learning. And when I look across at our organization, I say to myself, this is the first time in my career that I actually feel like an underachiever because I've got everyone around me just excelling at everything they do. And it's extraordinary.

Jackie - 00:11:39:

That's amazing, Kellie Thank you for sharing that. There's so much to unpack in what you just said, right? One is talking about the stigmas and the... Baked in assumptions about justice-involved individuals based on what we have read in the media or seen on TV, the way movies portray people, right? That there are negative, right? They're bad apples when really what it's important to identify is that very often folks that are justice-involved, there's a situation that occurred, or it could be one relationship. That was negative, that created this series of events that ended them, you know, with them being incarcerated. And, you know, that really could be any of us, you know, all of us have made some bad choices, you know, especially in our 20s, right? But, you know, for these individuals, it's about giving them an opportunity to. Make a change in their life. And what happens is once someone's justice involved, they have a hard time getting a job. They have a hard time finding a place to live because people don't want to rent to them. And so we as a society have got to do a better job in supporting these individuals as they're reintegrating back into our communities. That's so important. Kellie let's talk about, you know, what do we as a society have wrong about people that are justice involved? Like, tell us a little more about what you're finding interacting with these women in the Televerde program, about who they are and, you know, what they aspire to, right? Right. We. As a society, look at creating separation between each other, right? When really we all kind of want the same thing. We all aspire to the same thing. We want to be loved. We want it. Take care of our families. Tell us a little more about the women that you're encountering in the program.

Kellie - 00:13:48:

Yeah, I think when you meet them, you realize that we have more in common than we don't. And I think a lot of times there's a tendency, and again, it's because of the narratives we've been fed since we're very young from both the media and also from Hollywood, that the people who end up in prison, first of all, they deserve to be there. Not true. And the second thing is, is that they're irredeemable. And that's not true. To your point, a lot of men and women who are in prison ended up there because they didn't have good lawyering. Okay. They were stuck with a private defender. So you start to realize, I think, from my perspective, talking with them, I start to really see my own privilege. And not in a way, because I know anytime I say that, people are right. Oh, well, should I feel guilty? I don't feel guilty about my privilege. I feel lucky and I feel grateful. But it also, you know, by meeting different women from different walks of life, I'm able to see that we're not always born on the same base. You know, I may be on third base and some people on first, and there's a big difference in that. And I've had a lot of safety nets provided to me that these women have not. So I think that's something that we have to, in order to kind of develop empathy, I think we have to be willing to kind of listen and open our minds to the fact we may have been wrong. And we probably are wrong about people who are in prison. The narrative is false. And the only way to really get through that is to meet with people who are incarcerated. And I will tell you this, the numbers don't lie. I mean, the United States is what, you know, incarcerates the most people in the world. And there are as many people today incarcerated as there are people with four-year college degrees. And one in three people happens to have a family member who is incarcerated or has been incarcerated. So when you're incarcerating at the rate, eventually it's going to become personal to you. But we don't have to wait for that to happen. We can start to change our thinking now. And I'm really proud of so many of our women who come out and they decide to share their stories because I always tell them that if I were in their shoes, I don't think I would. I don't think I would want to staple my worst mistake to my resume and kind of wear it as some sort of a scarlet. But these women come out and they make the decision to do that. And the decision has a ripple effect because, you know, many of them are married. 80% of them have children. So by making their incarceration part of their personal brand, there's a ripple effect to that that is felt in their family. But they do it to try to drive change because that's the only thing that's going to drive change. The media is not going to put it, it's not going to celebrate the successes because it doesn't drive the click. So we have to give these women their voices so they can come out and help change hearts and minds in a way that makes society more willing to embrace the talent and the untapped potential that is in our prisons and more willing to just give them a fair shot when they get out. That's all they're looking for. As I said, I always talk about the handout versus the hand up, but that truly is what they want is a hand up. If I can tell you a quick story. During COVID. A gentleman that I work with now by the name of Tim Rowe, he had served 25 years in a men's prison in Arizona and he came out, it was during COVID. He was under house arrest. The only job he had ever had prior to prison was construction and he was not able to do that because he was under house arrest. His parole officer said, you know what? I don't know. I hear about this company called Televerde. Maybe call them. Now he knew about Televerde from being in the men's prison, but he said, we thought it was some kind of dialing for dollars telemarketing company. He said, but let me check them out. He said, when I checked, checked Televerde out, I realized it was so much more than what I had been led to believe in prison. He had no skills. He didn't have any computer skills, nothing. But when he interviewed with one of the women who formerly incarcerated herself, she saw herself in him and she gave him a shot just based on that. And he's excelling. He's a manager. He's a leader now in our organization and he's managing a team. And he's. Thriving over these last four or five years that he's been with us, but that that's not the solution, right? There are so many women and men being released each year. I think the number is 700,000 a year. And the number one reason they go back to jail is joblessness. So that's what sets people into the cycle of crime again. So we need to get smart because by skilling people in prison and giving them an opportunity to work after prison, you're not just helping them and breaking the cycle of incarceration. And their families were actually strengthening our communities. We're reducing crime. We're strengthening the economy. So there's nothing but wins for us. It's short sighted to just continue to see ourselves as this, having this punitive justice system and thinking that it's going to benefit us in the longterm because it hasn't thus far. I mean, we just have a prison population that it's exploding and it's, it's really problematic. And expensive.

Jackie - 00:19:20:

Absolutely, Kellie Such a good point. Will you tell us more about Televerde's companies, the companies that you're able to work with that are finding? Real value in partnering with you. To employ these individuals.

Kellie - 00:19:36:

Yeah, well, we have, you know, over the past 30 years that we've been in business, we partner with companies like Microsoft and SAP and Adobe. And what's fascinating to me about these companies is that, you know, they're working with us and getting the talent, but they're also hiring our employees directly when they get out of prison, which I think speaks to the caliber of talent. Televerde also hires a number of women. I think our workforce now about 40% have started their careers with us on the inside. So we have graduates that are in every level of the company in every department, including the C-suite. But I always think the true power of our model, I think for people to see is when they are able to go on to companies like Cisco and Salesforce and SAP and really continue their careers and thrive in those roles where I think, you know, that's when somebody has got to take a step back and say, Hey, you know what? It's not just kind of this Televerde is hiring them like these other big name recognizable companies are adding, you know, people who've been incarcerated into their workforce and it's having dramatic effects, you know, positive results on business. So it's pretty extraordinary.

Jackie - 00:20:50:

I love that. And these are companies, the companies that you named Kellie are companies that all of us, right? Professionals want to work at. Those are those big, big name companies that there are some. Cache to it. Right. So, so we're competing for those roles that the individuals who have gone through your program are getting. And I love that. That's, that's amazing that those big companies that have their choice of employees, right. Are choosing those, those individuals that have worked with them because of those traits and characteristics that they're displaying as they're learning how to work with them.

Kellie - 00:21:30:

Right. And I think also, you know, in kind of a contact center environment outside, you know, outside of our prisons, there tends to be a lot of turnover. So people tend to leave for a couple more dollars an hour or whatever the case may be. But I think what's really special about our company is the women have an average tenure of about four to five years working with us before they graduate. So when they're partnering with a client, they actually are becoming because of the length of time that they're working with the client, they're becoming true extensions of the sales and marketing team. So they're being they're being able to weigh in on strategy as well. And not only does that benefit the clients, but it's also benefiting the women themselves. It's giving them even more of a competitive edge. They're building strategy. They're contributing to it. They're getting feedback and they're coming up with ideas in order to respond to customer complaints or respond to customer questions. So it's really getting them to think beyond what one would consider to be just a straight up inside sales demand generation role. These women are going far beyond that and they're building more skills, hard and soft because of that.

Jackie - 00:22:45:

Absolutely. Kellie can you tell us a little about the Last Mile program?

Kellie - 00:22:51:

So the Last Mile program is a program that was started out in California. Um, I believe, um, the founder of that, he and his wife had visited San Quentin prison. I'm not sure the reason. And they saw an opportunity to teach the men there coding skills. And through that, I guess they put a business plan together and they got other investors in it. And I think, I'm not really sure of the, you know, of the whole story, to be honest with you. I see them as kind of like a partner in Second Chances, but they've grown into many other prisons across the country. One of the prisons that they're in happens to be the same prison in Arizona that we're in, in Madison, Indiana, or no, I'm sorry, it's Rockville, Indiana. And it was there that they trained one gal by the name of April Boswell. And she went through their program and she has probably, I think about at the time, maybe three years to her release. So she learned these incredible skills, but while in prison, didn't really have any place to kind of use them. So what would probably happen was you can continued to be a teaching assistant for Last Mile, but they would largely lay dormant. So we gave her an opportunity to join our company and become a website, you know, our website manager. So she's actually building a web developer career while in prison. So when she's able to be released, she's got an extraordinary career waiting for her. So that's some of the opportunities that we have found is working with some of the other nonprofit organizations within these prison facilities. We're able to support one another. And I know Last Mile has done some work with our foundation, the Televerde Foundation as well. So there's a lot of kind of crossover partnerships and supporting one another through this second chance effort that we're all, you know, committed to.

Jackie - 00:24:52:

I loved that, I love that. Kellie with the work that Televerde is doing in similar organizations, how does that affect the recidivism rate?

Kellie - 00:24:59:

Well, I can tell you that since Televerde launched in, well, as we came to be in 1994, we officially launched as an organization in 1995. So over that time, we've graduated over 4,000 women and we have a recidivism rate of 5.4%, which really kind of underscores the value of not only these kind of rehabilitative programs, but also the re-entry services that the women receive through the Televerde Foundation. And I also want to kind of put some context around how dramatic of a number that is, dramatically low, because nationally, the three-year recidivism rate is 68%. So that means that within three years, 68% of the people who are released from prison will go back into prison. And as I said, about 700,000 are being released every year. When you get to five years, that number jumps up to 80%. So everything that we've been doing since 1994, has done nothing to serve the public well, and has done nothing to serve their families well. I mean, we know for women, 80% are mothers. So you have these children that are just being discarded, kind of like, well, collateral damage. No, they eventually, most of them will end up in our system. The other thing I want to mention is the generational effect, is what we found through a study with the Seidman Research Institute through Arizona State University, is that the graduates of our program. There are children are 11 times less likely to wind up incarcerated. And 11 times more likely to graduate high school and go on to higher education. So it's really kind of extraordinary. You know, we know what needs to be done. So now it's just getting prison reform to be adopted across the country in ways that really kind of increase value. You know, I always say you fix the woman and you fix the family. Right. And if women are able to kind of stand on their own and support their families, it's going to have a ripple effect that is really dramatic for their children.

Jackie - 00:27:04:

That's so amazing, Kellie And, you know. To just reiterate again, the reason why the recidivism rate is so high in general is not because these folks are wanting to do the same thing that they did to get them in that position in the first place. It's because when they are released, their intention is to find a good job and find a good place to live and be with their families. And the stopping point is us. It's society that's not giving them that job, that's not giving them that place to stay. And that's our responsibility because it affects families. It affects, as you said, the next generation. If we're doing right by these folks that are coming out of the prison system and reintegrating back into our communities. That helps their families, that helps the next generation, and that helps our communities in general. And it's so important. I think it's amazing the work that you're doing and the fact that the work that you're doing is creating gainful employment for the folks coming through your program.

Kellie - 00:28:21:

Thank you for saying that. And we really do. We owe it all to, as I mentioned their names earlier, Ron Bell and Jim Hooker. And one thing that Jim Hooker said a lot, he had this quote, he would say, discarding somebody for a mistake that they made on the worst day of their life is such a waste of human potential. And he really believed that. And it really is true. These women made a mistake. We all make mistakes. You know, it's not to minimize their mistakes. Sometimes their mistakes are, you know, are great. But they're paying their debt to society by being incarcerated. And they're doing everything that they can. In order to improve and create a better life for themselves while they're incarcerated. I can't think of a worse place to try to learn and grow and change than in a prison environment. And, you know, society needs to do more when they get out to give them opportunity, because you're right, without opportunity, you do what you have to survive. And when we have to just do things to survive, we're not making the right choices. And those are the choices that send us back. There's a lot more work that can be done. I am inspired, you know, as I said, by Televerde. It's why I'm here. The Televerde Foundation, extraordinary work. Organizations like The Last Mile, Persevere Program. I mean, they're all in it for the right reasons. And they're making the right changes. But we just, we need to do more. And we need our government to be invested more. And we need the business community to open their doors more than they are to men and women who are qualified but happen to have criminal backgrounds.

Jackie - 00:30:07:

Absolutely. And, you know, it's worth saying, too, Kellie that most people that are incarcerated are not incarcerated for violent crimes. And so as you're thinking about, you know, how does that relate to your business as a business owner? It's not a situation where you have to be concerned about safety of your teams, right? And so as we think about that, what's our responsibility, Kellie as business leaders to lift up these individuals that have been justice involved and give them access to positions within our organizations and opportunities for career success?

Kellie - 00:30:50:

You know, it's interesting because we, you know, I get asked the question a lot about, well, you're only working with nonviolent offenders, right? To be honest with you, I don't know the crimes. You know, DOC approves who can come work for us. So I don't Google them. I'm not interested. I'm interested in the woman who's before me today, not who she was five or 10 years before. So that much is true, I can tell you. But what my answer is always, we work with people who have a release date and society has to be invested in anybody who has a release date because they're going to come out of prison. And what you want them to do is come out and be rehabilitated and be able to sustain that rehabilitation throughout their journey as citizens. So I think we have a responsibility to elevate anybody, to help elevate anybody who's saying, hey, I want to be elevated. I want to work. I want to be more than my worst mistake, regardless of what that mistake is. I mean, I don't... I don't think we get to pick and choose which crimes we'll forgive and are okay and which crimes we won't. I think if we're second chance employers, we have to be second chance employers and we have to be hiring the best candidate, regardless of what that person's background or circumstance might be. Because again... What I have learned with the women I work with is like every crime likely has context that we're unaware of. And, you know, you can kind of go through some crimes that we would probably find quite heinous. But when you kind of look in the background, you say, oh, okay, I didn't know this. She was abused by her husband. It's a make-believe that happened, right? But you kind of start to understand things more. So I don't know. I'd just like to see far less judgment and more kind of growth mind, you know, kind of practicing the values that every company says that they espouse to living. Inclusion should mean all. It shouldn't mean some or those that look like me or those that have the same background as me. I want inclusion to mean inclusion. I want everyone to have a fair shot. So I think that's what the business community needs to do more of. And I think that's what society needs to do more of. And obviously, we need to do that as individuals. And that's probably been my. Greatest learning throughout all this. I mean, I try to remember what I thought about people who were incarcerated before I joined Televerde. And yeah, I think I bought into the narrative. I think I saw things like Oz and Orange is the New Black and read them stories in the media. And I think I probably bought into that narrative. And when I went out there and I met with these women and I heard them speak, and if you had put a curtain up between them and me, I would have thought all of these women had advanced degrees. I mean, I spent 14 years at Avaya and it is true. They knew more about my company than I did. And I'm in communications. Right. So it's extraordinary to me. Yeah. What are we selling again? What does this product do? You know, I mean, they knew it. And they knew it inside and out as if they had been true employees. And I'll tell you something. Understanding technology is not easy.

Jackie - 00:34:06:

That's right.

Kellie - 00:34:07:

Yeah. Especially when you're talking about these big kind of enterprise communication solutions. So it's life-changing and it's mind-changing. That's what I think it is. And I love the fact that my mind was opened. And now I think they've taught me to even be conscious of kind of other stigmas out there. Like I said, you know, getting caught up in like ageism and all that. And, you know, oh, well, he's older. He can't learn. No, he can. He can learn. You know, this is me kind of buying into that stigma again. So it's just becoming more aware and just getting to know the individual instead of judging a community. Of people who you don't know. And who you don't understand and you don't know their journeys. I'm very passionate about this.

Jackie - 00:34:51:

I love it. I love it, Kellie And so well said. And that's exactly right. You know, it's time for us to start rethinking these implicit biases that we have that have in narratives that have been fed to us, right? And really start thinking for ourselves, okay, look at some of the changes that these individuals have been able to make and how they're really excelling in the workplace. And I think that's amazing. Kellie from a personal perspective, how does your work with Televerde and the lives that you're able to affect as an organization and the families that you're able to affect, how does that make you feel?

Kellie - 00:35:34:

It makes me feel great. It's, you know, for several years before joining Televerde, I struggled in technology. And I would have these conversations with my husband saying, like, I don't know, I just feel like I have this gift to be able to write. And I'm using it in a way where I don't see that I'm really kind of adding any social value. Like, to be perfectly frank, I didn't like what I saw in the C-suite. I didn't like the golden parachutes. I didn't like any of that. I didn't like being a part of it, quite frankly. But I didn't think I had many options, you know, because I thought the only place I could find purpose was in a nonprofit. So being able to find purpose in a for-profit was really rewarding for me and to be able to kind of use my skills to kind of tell these stories. And it's, you know, it sounds cliche, but... You know, they thank me all the time and just not just me personally, but everybody's, you know, they're very, very grateful for the opportunity and for your. Investment of time in them and all of that. But I think, you know, they've definitely made me a better person. And from a communications perspective, again, being kind of in that high tech kind of dog eat dog world, I think. I think I lost sight of the humanity in my role, even as a writer. You know, here I'm talking to employees. Um, but really, um, thinking employees about employees more as probably numbers, particularly when it came to some of the hard decisions the company made about maybe layoffs and, uh, severance packages and, uh, furloughs and you name it. I had to write about it and, um, being very disconnected, uh, from, you know, from a writer to who is receiving it. And I think working for Telaverde. The women have brought that humanity back and they've made me kind of think about the communication and who is receiving it. And maybe it requires a conversation in addition to a communication. It's not just, let me get it off my desk. Let me just get it off my to-do list. It's out the door. It's really making sure that they understand, making sure that they're aligned and kind of taking the time to answer their questions and helping them understand. So for me, it's been nothing but benefits where I very often feel like they're the teachers because they're giving me so much more than I give them. I just have the good fortune of being able to take their stories, share it with the public in the hopes that we're able to drive more change for them. And for, you know, Unfortunately, the young girl who's out there who isn't incarcerated today, but she will find herself incarcerated in a month or six months or a year and wanting to have an opportunity for her. Because as I said, we're only in three states. So, you know, there are other states that need to be providing these programs to both men and women. I truly feel like every day is a gift. And I say that saying like that's not saying every day is great. And sometimes I push myself away from my desk. You've got to be kidding me. Why am I here? But at the end of the day, there's this model and there is these extraordinary women. And I am just so thankful and privileged to be a part of their journeys.

Jackie - 00:38:54:

That's amazing.

Kellie - 00:38:54:

And I 1000% feel that way.

Jackie - 00:38:57:

Amazing. Kellie as we begin to wrap up, what's the message that you want to leave our listeners with today?

Kellie - 00:39:04:

Lift people up. That's, you know, lift people up. Don't judge, open your hearts, open your minds. You know, a lot of the narratives that we hold are wrong. There are people out there who are just looking for opportunity. There's a saying, talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. I now know this to be true, 1000%. There's a lot of talent in our prisons. And I just, I think if we can let our guard down and kind of let ourselves. Meet these, you know, One thing I say too is, you know, stop driving around the neighborhoods. Start driving through them. And that could be both literally and figuratively, because that's what we have the tendency. If we don't see it, maybe it doesn't exist. And that hasn't served our country well. It hasn't served our businesses well. And it hasn't served families and individuals well. So I want us to start going through the neighborhoods with eyes wide open. And, you know, start listening to the people and hearing them and talking to them, to the people in those neighborhoods. And I guarantee your eyes will be open and you'll be more enlightened. And work, I would say grateful for having the experience.

Jackie - 00:40:24:

Absolutely. Kellie that was so well said. Thank you for that. That's great advice for all of us. How can listeners learn more about televerting and connect with them?

Kellie - 00:40:36:

Well, we have our website, televerde.com. So T-E-L-E, V as in Victor, E-R-D as in David, E.com. So on that, you'll find all the different sales and marketing solutions that we offer in order to drive business results for our clients. Within that also, you will find, I talk about having gone out to the prison and meet with the women. We do that with people who are hiring, come out and meet with the women and also prospects and clients. And we realized that we couldn't bring everybody out to the prison. So what we did was we created a virtual round table on our website. And that's what it's called, a virtual round table. And you can go there. And there are actually 14 women and one man, Tim Rowe, who I mentioned earlier. And they share their journeys of transformation. I think 12 of them are currently incarcerated and the other three are graduates. But it's a really moving experience. And you just sit with them. And whether you sit with them for three minutes or for the full seven or eight minutes, however long their video is, I think you'll really be impressed. Not only you'll have more understanding for where they came from, and I think you'll be really impressed by where they are today and where they're going in the future. So it's eye-opening. It's moving. You'll cry. Some of them make you laugh. You'll cheer. But I think you'll come away with much more empathy and understanding for men and women are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated.

Jackie - 00:42:08:

Kellie thank you so much for being here. This has been such a great conversation and an important one. Thanks so much.

Kellie - 00:42:15:

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I loved it.

Jackie - 00:42:21:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Diversity Beyond the Checkbox. If you loved this show, please take a moment to share it with a friend, leave a rating and review, and subscribe so you'll be reminded when new episodes are released. Become part of our community on Instagram, LinkedIn. X, YouTube, and TikTok, or subscribe to our newsletter at beyondthecheckbox.com. This show is part of the Living Corporate Network, sponsored by the Diversity Movement, and edited and produced by EarFluence. I'm Jackie Ferguson. Take care of yourself and each other.