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Harvard Law School’s Transactional Law Clinics launched the Fresh Start Entrepreneurship and Financial Capability Program in collaboration with First Step Alliance and the City of Boston to offer formerly incarcerated individuals entrepreneurial skills for financial stability as they re-enter society.
The partnership, which developed in the spring of 2023, was piloted last semester and is currently in its second phase. Carmen E. Halford, a member and instructor of the Transactional Law Clinics, helped spearhead the partnership. She said she was determined to “find ways that our clinic could get more involved with helping returning citizens.”
“It’s not like TLC needs to find new clients. It’s more that we recognize that there's a need from this group, and we want to make sure that we're making ourselves available to help,” Halford said. She emphasized the significance of returning citizens to “control their own destinies.”
When creating the program with Halford, Nancy M. Eiden, the founder of First Step Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to aiding formerly incarcerated individuals in their re-entry, recognized a common theme. “Many incarcerated individuals are interested in or thinking about starting a new business,” Eiden said.
“Many of these folks have never had any type of business education or entrepreneurship training, or even personal finance knowledge,” she added.
The program offers workshops on different aspects of starting a new business, from planning to legal counsel, with the ultimate goal of economic justice and financial independence.
“Entrepreneurship is not really a choice, it is more pursued as a necessity, often because there is discrimination against people in the ordinary labor market,” Halford said, highlighting stigmas, direct restrictions, and even good moral character requirements, that prevent returning citizens from accessing economic mobility.
Nevertheless, partners initially struggled to find participants and acquire capital for the program. A slew of other organizations — including the Boston Mayor’s Office of Returning Citizens, Reentry Survivors, and SCORE — have stepped in to provide resources, personnel, and direct funding, enabling participants to open businesses with low initial capital requirements, such as barber shops, personal training, and trucking.
For the students, Fresh Start gives them an opportunity to directly apply what they are learning in the classroom. They create presentations explaining legal considerations for starting a business, host Q&A sessions where participants in Fresh Start could interact with working attorneys, and establish support networks for returning citizens.
By participating in Fresh Start, Halford said students in the clinic are “building these amazing skills on the transactional side, which they can actually employ in a way that brings economic justice to a lot of communities where wealth building has been severely restricted.”
Nicky Yoon, a HLS senior, said providing guidance to returning citizens forced her to present her advice in a less “legalistic” way: “How would pre-law school me receive this material?” she said. Yoon described the overall experience as “very rewarding,” specifically in being able to “make an immediate and tangible impact.”
“Law school is very theoretical and sometimes it feels abstract, but working at the clinic put things into perspective,” Ian H. Malesiewski, another HLS student involved with TLC, said. “It was the first time in law school that I felt like I was actually helping somebody.”
