Formerly incarcerated leaders bring an understanding of higher education policy that research and outside analysis alone cannot provide. They know where policies break down in practice, where barriers persist, and what changes can expand opportunity.

Yet for too long, people who have navigated these systems firsthand have been excluded from the rooms where solutions are designed.

In 2021, EdTrust launched the Justice Fellows Policy Program around a different premise: Higher education policy is stronger when people with lived experience help shape it.

Higher education is one of the clearest pathways to opportunity after incarceration. When Congress restored Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated people in 2023, more than 760,000 people regained access to federal financial aid for postsecondary education.

Since then, more than 30 fellows across five cohorts have testified before state legislatures, co-authored policy tools, founded organizations, influenced state policy, and stepped into leadership roles nationwide.

Thirteen fellows have become first-time homebuyers. Four have launched programs or organizations that have collectively raised more than $1 million. Others now lead higher education in prison initiatives, conduct research, attend law school, and advocate for policy change in their states.

Together, they are redefining who is recognized as an expert on justice-impacted students.

The work remains urgent. Higher education is one of the clearest pathways to opportunity after incarceration. When Congress restored Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated people in 2023, more than 760,000 people regained access to federal financial aid for postsecondary education.

But restoring Pell was not the end of the work. Justice Fellows are helping identify the barriers that remain and shape what should come next.

As part of my EdTrust internship, I spoke with fellows and program leaders across five cohorts about what they learned, what they are proudest of, and what still needs to change.

Lived Experience as Expertise

For Alexa Garza, a member of the inaugural cohort, the fellowship arrived during a period of uncertainty.

“When I applied for the Justice Fellowship, I was still trying to find my place after prison,” she said. “Honestly, I didn’t think I had a chance of being selected.”

The experience changed her trajectory.

“The fellowship changed my life,” Garza said. “It opened doors I never imagined I would walk through and, more importantly, helped me believe I belonged in those rooms.”

What distinguished the fellowship, she said, was that EdTrust treated fellows as colleagues and their experiences as expertise.

“We were part of the team, and our perspectives were respected as expertise,” she said.

Garza went on to testify before the Texas legislature, help create a toolkit identifying barriers to higher education in prison, and contribute to efforts that led Texas to codify higher education in prison into state law.

Her experience illustrates a principle that has shaped the fellowship from the beginning: The people navigating a system every day often understand most clearly where it fails and what meaningful change requires.

Returning to the System as a Leader

Maria Garza began her education while incarcerated in Illinois. She later became the first formerly incarcerated higher education in prison student to return to an Illinois correctional facility as an employee of a prison education program.

After graduating from Northwestern University’s Prison Education Program, she built partnerships between Illinois colleges and the Illinois Department of Corrections, helping bridge communication among universities, correctional staff, and incarcerated students.

“That milestone demonstrates what is possible when institutions are willing to rethink traditional barriers and trust lived expertise,” she said.

Her advocacy also produced concrete changes. She pushed Northwestern to establish a bachelor’s degree pathway that allowed students to continue their education after release and worked with the Illinois Department of Corrections to allow incarcerated women to participate in classes with male students by video.

For Maria Garza, traditional measures such as enrollment and graduation capture only part of what success should mean.

“Success should be measured not simply by enrollment or graduation, but by whether students have the opportunity to continue their education, secure stable housing and employment, and become leaders who help shape the systems that once impacted them,” she said.

Building the Program Alongside Fellows

William Freeman III, now EdTrust’s higher education justice initiatives manager, has watched the program evolve since participating in its earliest cohort.

That evolution has required adjustment. Early cohorts attracted highly credentialed applicants even though the fellowship sought to develop people earlier in their policy careers. Later cohorts included more director-level professionals whose institutional roles sometimes limited how candidly they could speak.

Each cohort helped EdTrust better understand whom the program should serve and what fellows need to thrive.

Freeman also challenges the idea that reduced recidivism should be the primary measure of success. Fellows are earning credentials, building families, achieving financial stability, buying homes, and becoming leaders. Those outcomes matter too.

The program redesigned its post-program survey accordingly, looking at housing, family, education, assets, and other indicators rather than reducing fellows’ experiences to a single measure.

That broader approach has helped EdTrust support fellows such as Roderick Jackson, a Cohort 3 fellow from Texas, as he secured stable housing and ultimately gained admission to law school.

The fellowship is also helping build a pipeline of directly impacted researchers.

Jarrod Wall, a Cohort 1 fellow who recently earned his Ph.D. from Tulane University, has highlighted the shortage of formerly incarcerated researchers helping shape the questions, methods, and findings that influence policy on housing, reentry, workforce development, and education.

His path from fellow to leading a feasibility assessment for the program’s research fellowship strand represents the kind of leadership pipeline EdTrust hopes to expand.

Community as Infrastructure

The fellowship’s impact is not limited to individual accomplishments or policy wins.

Patrick Rodriguez, a Cohort 1 fellow and now inaugural co-executive director of the Georgia Coalition for Higher Education in Prison, said one of the program’s most important outcomes was the community fellows built together.

“The community and relationships built during the fellowship, and how the entire cohort showed up for one another,” he said, is what has stayed with him most.

Shannon Ross echoed that point. The fellowship helped him recognize that the challenges he experienced as a leader were shared by others doing similar work.

“We are close to both greatness and despair in this work if we don’t stay connected, stay vulnerable, and share resources,” Ross said.

Those relationships have produced tangible results. Ross’s organization recently received the final year of a capacity grant secured through relationships developed during the fellowship.

The Work Still Ahead

Five years of progress have also revealed where more work is needed.

The fellowship stipend remains limited, Freeman said, and many participants leave the program in roughly the same financial position in which they began. Fellows’ contractor status also makes providing benefits or deeper financial support more difficult.

Building stronger partnerships with justice-impacted organizations and state legislative offices remains an ongoing priority.

And while restoring Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated students was a major victory, significant policy gaps remain.

One Texas-based fellow, for example, earned four associate degrees using his available Pell eligibility only to discover that no federal funding remained for him to pursue a bachelor’s degree.

It is exactly the kind of unintended consequence that people with firsthand experience are uniquely positioned to identify.

A Model Worth Building On

The Justice Fellows Policy Program was never designed simply to collect stories. It was created to give people who have experienced incarceration real influence over the research, policy, and decisions that shape students’ lives.

Five cohorts and more than 30 fellows later, participants have become homeowners, founders, executive directors, researchers, policy advisors, and advocates creating change across the country.

For Patrick Rodriguez, one of the fellowship’s greatest successes remains the community it fostered and the way fellows continue to show up for one another.

That may be the program’s clearest lesson after five years: When institutions move beyond simply listening to people with lived experience and invest in their leadership, they don’t just develop better policy. They build the people and relationships capable of changing systems.

Learn more about EdTrust’s Justice Fellows Policy Program.

Duke Cruz Dela Rosa was a summer 2026 higher education and development intern