Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted Peoples & Families Movement National Conference 2016

We are at very unique moment in our struggle. The public discourse is filled with talk about ending mass incarceration by elected officials, academics, correctional officials, and funders. We are organizing this conference to specifically strengthen the voices of formerly incarcerated people and our families and to ensure that our ideas are included in the discourse. As the Formerly Incarcerated & Convicted People & Families Movement, we have made real progress since our first meeting in Selma in 2011.  As a movement, we need the opportunity to collectively discuss the progress that we have made. We also need the opportunity and space to determine where we should be going during the next Presidential Administration. In the past year, we have conducted several regional meetings where we presented expert panels of formerly incarcerated people and our family members. This National Conference will be an opportunity to explore our best practices and see what is being done across the country. We strongly encourage you join us for networking, sharing of resources, tabling and organizing opportunities, and we guarantee that you will meet some of the most interesting activists and people from our community.

We are also encouraging service providers, allies, foundations, and government officials to attend: this is a space in which formerly incarcerated people will be speaking in our own voices, sharing the wisdom and practical knowledge we’ve gained as activists and organizers over many years following incarceration, and discussing how best we can restore our rights and fully rejoin our communities.

Formerly Incarcerated People have elected to collectively and heavily invest in the conference. We have reserved the Oakland Airport Hilton Hotel and we have set aside resources to provided scholarship support to formerly incarcerated people and their families. We must once again pose the critical question we first raised at Selma when organizing the next conference: “Will You Be There?”

FICPFM is a group of national organiziations comprised of & led by formerly incarcerated people dedicated to ending mass incarceration, restoring our rights, & removing the barriers to employment, housing, & education.