Level Up: Building Skills, Confidence, and Independence for Life After Incarceration

Written By Michelle Daniel

At Constructing Our Future, we believe that safe housing is only the beginning. Our new Level-Up Curriculum provides formerly incarcerated women with a structured pathway to build the skills, knowledge, and confidence needed to create stable and successful futures.

Through courses in financial literacy, conflict resolution, domestic violence awareness, civic engagement, workforce readiness, and parenting, residents develop practical tools for navigating life after incarceration. Combined with individualized support and elective learning opportunities, the curriculum helps women strengthen their independence, achieve their goals, and move toward permanent housing, meaningful employment, and family reunification.

The Level-Up Curriculum reflects our commitment to helping women do more than reenter society—we help them level up and construct new futures.

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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