I worked on the case management system for the remedy writing portion of our organization this summer, specifically on collecting all emails, reviewing them, adding new members to our registered list, and communicating with our clients on a regular basis. The Remedy Project’s mission is to train undergraduate students to write administrative remedies, the only official recourse that incarcerated people have in federal prisons when their rights are violated. To begin to write these remedies, we need to establish a strong communicative bond with our clients so they can give us vital information and we can ask questions that will strengthen our arguments. By handling the emails entirely by myself this summer, I was able to fulfill an important role, bridging the gap between the inside and outside — an extremely important part of our organization. I also relayed infomation between our clients and our formerly incarcerated mentors, since many messages require their experience to interpret. In this way, we have various exchanges of information and communication occurring, both between students and incarcerated clients and between formerly incarcerated mentors and students, another major goal of our organization.

I am currently studying neuroscience and public health. I definitely applied knowledge and skill sets from both fields because prisons themselves are public health crises that directly cause psychological harm to people behind bars. In communicating with our clients, the same themes come up time after time: blatant disregard of humanity, unjustified punishment, and physical and psychological torture. My academic studies in neuroscience have emphasized humanity through science and shifting away from stereotypes traditionally known as “normal” and “abnormal.” My studies in public health have framed the broader settings that contribute to wellbeing on a community- and society-level. At The Remedy Project, I came in with this academic knowledge and immediately noticed the disconnect with reality as voiced through our clients, using my studies to supplement my communication with clients to write stronger remedies.

The biggest challenge I faced was the shortage of funding for our organization. This made it extremely hard for our full-time staff to support themselves and therefore run the organization effectively. Since The Remedy Project relies heavily on formerly incarcerated mentors who have the experience and knowledge to guide our remedy-writing and case management, without the means to pay them, our knowledge source was depleted, creating a domino effect for the student volunteers involved and the broader organization. A lack of adequate funding was tough because what once was a quickly growing organization that reached a new milestone every week suddenly had to roll back operations, reassess capabilities and staff numbers, and halt progress. Because we had two co-directors who run the leadership of the organization largely on their own shoulders, they were soon the only full-time employees after funding became scarce. Because they had so many things to deal with, communication with student volunteers also fell through, so there was a lot of confusion about where exactly the organization was and what was to come. This was frustrating, but we have since had meetings and conversations that have redirected us toward a new step in our organization.

I have learned that communication in a small, growing organization is probably the most important thing everyone can work on. It eases frustration, keeps everyone up to date, and is key in keeping morale up across teams. This holds true with my role over the summer as well, since I was in charge of direct communication with clients. As our organization was changing and growing, I had to keep everyone up-to-date to ensure that there was as little frustration on our clients’ side as possible. Since we are a service-based organization with students writing administrative remedies on behalf of our clients, we have to keep the relationship between ourselves and our clients strong and equal. They deserve respect as much as we deserve respect. As I move on in this organization, I want to write more remedies and help steer ourselves in a better direction with more communication and cooperation.