FreeWorld

FreeWorld solves the problems of career instability and limited economic mobility that returning citizens face when they reenter society. Every year, more than 650,000 individuals are released from prison nationwide. Many of them will join the 3 million formerly incarcerated Americans who are chronically unemployed or underemployed. A 2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows that 33% of returning citizens found no employment over four years upon release. Those who found work averaged 3.4 jobs over four years. Returning citizens are leaving prison without access to skilling resources that give them a chance for career and financial stability.

The National Reentry Resource Center estimates that 72% of the restrictions placed on returning citizens are directly linked to employment opportunities. These restrictions range from state and federal laws limiting access to occupational licensing to discretionary bias by employers due to negative perceptions of people with criminal records. Many of the collateral consequences of imprisonment are indefinite, permanently impacting a formerly incarcerated individual’s job prospects.

The struggle to find and retain living-wage work is a crisis that perpetuates generational poverty for marginalized communities and drastically increases an individual’s risk of returning to prison.

FreeWorld reskills returning citizens to prepare them for stable, living-wage careers. Specifically, we use innovative technology to train and place formerly incarcerated individuals into the CDL-A trucking industry.

Our solution is a virtual end-to-end vocational training program. We deliver our programming through the Student Portal, a full-stack, automated online platform that helps learners overcome the roadblocks between themselves and a trucking career.

• Accessing Vital Documents: Upon application, program participants receive automated assistance to obtain vital identification documents that employers require.

• Virtual Education: Participants attend classes via Zoom, where FreeWorld instructors teach them the basics of truck driving and guide them through the permitting process.

• Trucking School: Once students receive their permits, we cover the tuition to attend a trucking school that’s local to them.

• Job Placement: After a student earns their CDL-A, our team immediately works to place them in a quality local trucking job so they return home from work to their families every night.

• Career Navigation: Our support continues for up to 5 years after job placement. We help individuals build soft skills for employment, such as resume building, salary negotiation, job interview techniques, and how to discuss their criminal history with employers.

Our solution serves returning citizens across the US. Most of the people we serve are BIPOC and living below the federal poverty guideline. The average FreeWorld applicant is released from prison with a 392 credit score, no wealth or assets, and more than $15,000 in debt. 38% of our applicants don’t have a bank account. Over 61% of applicants are 35 or older and entering their career’s middle or late stages. However, our applicants haven’t been afforded the opportunity of a single, stable career. The job opportunities for returning citizens are extremely limited; their stigmatized criminal record results in underpaid, inconsistent, and unskilled labor.

FreeWorld offers returning citizens a sustainable financial lifeline and a tangible career path through skills training, job placement services, and career support. Our graduates earn a skill in a field that demands workers, pays a living wage, and offers upward economic mobility and entrepreneurial opportunities. They’re able to establish savings, acquire assets, and build generation wealth. We estimate that our short-term investment in each graduate will increase their lifetime earnings by $1 million dollars.

At FreeWorld, We have a unique understanding of the challenges returning citizens face, and we believe all people deserve a legitimate second chance. Our founder, Jason Wang, was arrested at age 15 and given a 12-year sentence for aggravated robbery. Upon release, he earned two master’s degrees and was still unable to find a job due to his criminal history. Jason found people to invest in him and started FreeWorld to break down barriers to employment for returning citizens.

Justice-involvment and justice-impact is represented at every level of our team. Alissa Efteland, the team lead, was justice-impacted through an incarcerated partner launching her face-to-face with the dehumanizing inequities of the carceral system. Another example is O’Neal Heard, who leads our career services team. O’Neal was arrested for robbery as a teenager and sentenced to six years in prison. Upon release, O’Neal couldn’t find sustained employment due to his criminal record until he applied to FreeWorld’s training program. He earned his CDL-A, becoming one of the very first FreeWorld graduates. He was later hired to expand our program team and now helps our graduates navigate employment, using his experience as a former returning citizen, trucker, and program participant.

We’ve built a robust online community of 9,000 returning citizens, where active participants, program alumni, and staff interact and share feedback. The feedback we receive from students guides our program design. Each of our wraparound supports has been implemented in response to student feedback. For example, we learned students struggled to attend school full-time while trying to maintain another job to support themselves. We implemented weekly cash stipends as a wraparound support so students could focus their attention on attending and completing trucking school. Cash stipends have shortened training times, increased our graduation rate, and resulted in overwhelmingly positive feedback.

FreeWorld’s solution is built, tested, and proven successful at scale. We’ve grown from a program that graduated 174 CDL-A holders in 2022 to one that graduated more than 1,100 students in 2024. To date, we’ve measured the following impact:

• Cumulative CDL-A Holders (since 2020) - 2,111

• Cumulative Job Placements - 1,489

• Estimated cumulative annual wage earnings of graduates - $118M

• Estimated savings in marginal recidivism costs - $47.2M

• The median wage for our graduates is $58,500 compared to the $11,000 median income of returning citizens nationwide.

• The recidivism rate of our graduates is <5%, compared to the national recidivism rate of 68% within 3 years. 

We’ve maintained steady job placement and retention rates as we've grown. This is strong evidence that our approach is effective at scale and that access to living-wage careers reduces recidivism.

We recently conducted an external SROI (Social Return on Investment) analysis, which showed that we produce $23 of impact per individual for every dollar we spend and save the government $8 per dollar spent in tax revenue and reincarceration costs averted.

www.freeworld.org

FreeWorld leverages technology and the lived experience of our team to innovate the reentry experience. Unlike traditional programs, which often have long, unsustainable training periods for individuals facing immediate financial need, our model focuses on quick, effective solutions. We chose trucking due to its short training timeline and our ability to implement a virtual teaching model. Our approach is innovative because of its:

Speed - Through our virtual and comprehensive platform that meets individuals’ threshold needs, applicants can enroll in our program, earn their CDL-A, and be placed into a local trucking job paying $55k-100k in as little as 45 days.

Accessibility - Our platform is designed for and by formerly incarcerated individuals. FreeWorld is accessible from any computer or mobile device and is built to meet the needs of returning citizens, many of whom have limited digital literacy.

Lived Experience - With education and mentorship delivered by those with lived experience, our staff truly understands the reentry process. We provide the guidance and resources we wish had been available.

Additionally, we offer innovative tech tools to help students as they go through the program, such as integrating Uber into the platform. Lack of transportation can be the ultimate barrier between returning citizens and a job. We partnered with Uber to build a frictionless API so our students can book free transportation to trucking school and job interviews at the click of a button.

We’ve identified a way to embrace emerging AI technologies and leverage their capabilities for our students’ benefit. We’re building an interactive AI coach to guide students through the CDL-A permitting, licensing process, and job search process at their own pace and on their own time. Through ChatGPT, we’ve developed a prototype for an AI coach that we trained using existing internal trucking school data sets.

1. Ensure that every returning citizen has access to a living-wage career and economic stability

FreeWorld is incredibly proud of our progress in reskilling more than 1,100 returning citizens in one year. However, it’s just a step toward our long-term goal to eliminate recidivism and generational poverty by breaking down employment barriers for the 650,000+ people released annually. We measure progress in achieving this ambitious goal by tracking the number of individuals we serve through our direct service model. To measure long-term economic stability, we’re integrating more longitudinal wage and tax data into our database, providing a comprehensive dataset revealing FreeWorld’s impact. Eventually, we will expand to additional in-demand vocations beyond trucking to ensure that returning citizens of all abilities and learning styles have the opportunity to be reskilled.

2. Change the landscape of fair-chance hiring practices

As mentioned earlier, employer discrimination against returning citizens is the largest barrier between them and a living-wage career. One of the primary reasons FreeWorld chose trucking as our initial vocation is that the massive shortage of CDL-A drivers means companies are more willing to hire individuals with criminal records. Our goal is to leverage this opportunity to advance the broader fair-chance hiring movement for millions of people with criminal records. We’ve established an Employer Partnerships team that forms relationships with major companies that can hire our graduates in bulk. We target industry leaders who are receptive to inclusive hiring practices. As we supply these companies with a stream of well-trained, qualified, and motivated employees, we prove that returning citizens can be assets to organizations. As other companies see this success, they’ll become more amenable to hiring returning citizens. We're laying the groundwork for influence and advocacy on systemic barriers that keep successful workforce re-entry out of reach for too many formerly incarcerated people.

Full-Time Staff: 31

Part-Time Staff: 0

Contractors: 6

5 years

Our leadership team is led by Jason Wang, an Asian-American and first-generation college graduate with firsthand experience in the criminal justice system. He founded FreeWorld on the principle that everyone, including prospective employees, deserves an equal opportunity. In the past, we have spent twice the time it would take to hire someone for a role because of our dedication to finding a team member with lived experience. In addition to prioritizing lived experience, we hire individuals from diverse backgrounds and embrace our differences to foster an organizational culture of respect and inclusion. As we continue to scale and increase the size of our staff and Board, we have the goal to further diversify our team to reflect the range of demographics of the people we serve.

FreeWorld strives to create an inclusive and supportive work environment where every employee feels valued and heard. We actively encourage open communication, ensuring that all team members are included in the feedback process and have the opportunity to share their thoughts with leadership. This transparency helps to build trust and fosters a culture of collaboration. We promote equity through our commitment to the growth and development of our team members. Every employee has access to professional development opportunities that are paid for by the company. We believe in nurturing talent from within and prioritize internal promotions, giving our staff an equal chance to advance and grow their careers with us.

FreeWorld has received seven-figure gifts from various national funders, including The Gates Foundation, Blue Meridian Partners, the Quality Jobs Fund, and ICONIQ. We’ve attracted a network of supporters, allowing us to launch our work and grow our revenue tenfold over the past three years. We have a strong track record of meeting and exceeding KPIs and milestones, which has allowed us to retain major funding partners who value measurable impact. Since 2020, we’ve raised more than $35.4M in fundraising revenue. We will continue to fund our work through donations and grants while exploring government revenue streams that will build long-term sustainability and help us achieve systems-wide scale and change.

We’re in the middle of transforming our revenue system by coordinating with American Job Centers (AJCs) to cover the direct training costs of the people we serve while improving best practices for stakeholders. AJCs help find employment opportunities for returning citizens. They have a lot of infrastructure and federal funding but lack the innovative technology to serve their population efficiently. Our strategy is to approach AJCs with our technology and offer to provide our platform and services for free. AJCs benefit from using FreeWorld’s innovative platform to improve the outcomes for returning citizens. In turn, AJCs will use funding through WIOA to cover students’ trucking school tuition, which comprises ~60% of our direct costs. We’ve launched pilots with AJCs in 4 states, serving 62 returning citizens and saving $310,000. To cover the remaining direct costs, we're actively exploring SNAP Employment and Training (E&T), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and contracts with federal and county-level agencies. By leveraging our technology to form strategic partnerships with government agencies and diversify our revenue, we're positioning ourselves to become the largest reentry nonprofit in the nation, serving 10,000+ returning citizens per year.

The Truist Foundation and FreeWorld share a goal to break down barriers for individuals seeking employment and create tangible pathways to economic mobility. We’re confident we have the technology, proximate experience, and innovative spirit to become the largest reentry nonprofit in the US, serving 10,000+ returning citizens per year. To achieve that growth and success, we’d value the capacity-building, wraparound support program offered by the Truist Foundation. The comprehensive assessment and ongoing support will help us crystallize our internal needs and drive meaningful results for stakeholders. The collaborative ecosystem of the peer-to-peer network will allow us to exchange innovative ideas and receive feedback from like-minded organizations. The learning and development modules will refine our operations and plans for growth.