Building Capacity, Strengthening Futures: COF and Butler University Collaborate on New Educational Resources

Written By Michelle Daniel

In partnership with Butler University’s service-learning program, students in the “Abolition” course taught by Alex Roehrkasse helped Constructing Our Future develop two new educational offerings: Parenting After Incarceration and Civic Engagement. These courses are tailored to address the unique challenges faced by formerly incarcerated women and provide practical tools, knowledge, and strategies to strengthen family relationships, navigate reunification, understand civic rights and responsibilities, and build long-term stability and community engagement.

A second group of Butler students partnered with COF to develop our new Board Handbook, a critical resource designed to strengthen organizational governance and sustainability. The handbook serves as a comprehensive guide for board members, outlining roles and responsibilities, committee structures, governance policies, ethical standards, and organizational expectations. By formalizing board practices and providing clear guidance for current and future leaders, the handbook helps ensure continuity, accountability, and effective stewardship of COF’s mission as we continue to grow and expand our impact throughout Indiana.

2026 Abolition Class Students, Professor Roehrkrasse of Butler University, Michelle Daniel Jones and Kaiesha Turman

Thank you Students!!!!!

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Thank you Students!!!!! 〰️

Michelle Daniel

Michelle Daniel Jones, ABD is a sixth-year doctoral student in the American Studies New York University. Michelle’s dissertation focuses on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated people. As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert she creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of taskforces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration. She has joined Second Chance Educational Alliance as a Senior Research Consultant and the Women Transcending Oral History Project as a co-researcher. and serves on the boards of Worth Rises and Correctional Association of New York and advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, the Survivor’s Justice Project, The Education Trust, Urban Institute and ITHAKA's Higher Ed in Prison Project.

She is Executive Director of Constructing Our Future, a housing organization created by incarcerated women in Indiana. Michelle author and co-editor of the award-winning Who Would Believe a Prisoner: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920, published by the New Press. As an artist, Michelle finds ways to funnel her research into theater, dance and photography. Her co-authored play, “The Duchess of Stringtown” was produced in 2017 in Indianapolis and New York and her artist installation about weaponized stigma, “Point of Triangulation,” ran in New York 2019 and 2020, Philadelphia 2021 with a public mural. “Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death and Imprisonment, explores COVID-19 in prisons, ran in Chicago 2023 and producer on the film, Degrees of Freedom that premiered in 2024.

https://www.michelledanieljones@gmail.com
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