Building Second Chances: Tools for Local Reentry | National Reentry Resource Center

Introduction to the Reentry Toolkit

Building Second Chances: Tools for Local Reentry Coalitions is a comprehensive toolkit for reentry coalition leaders and local city, county, and community leaders who want to play an active role in improving reentry policy, practice, and outcomes.

This toolkit will help you to take stock of how best to improve outcomes for people leaving prison and jail. It will help you evaluate your current reentry efforts and map out the future of reentry for your community.

The toolkit has user-friendly references to seminal publications, research findings, and noteworthy examples to give you the knowledge and skills to design new and reinvigorate existing reentry strategies.Throughout this toolkit, you will find:

Questions to Consider: Prompts to guide local reentry coalition leaders in taking stock of current reentry efforts and help spark additional conversations about where to focus attention

Examples from the Field: Real-world accounts of how communities throughout the country are working to strengthen the reentry process

Quick References: Curated collections of resources for easy access to the most useful publications, research articles, databases, and field guides.

The toolkit is divided into three parts:

Part 1. Fundamentals of Reentry
This part defines the building blocks of advancing systemic efforts to improve the lives of people returning to their communities after incarceration.

Part 2. Tools for Change
This part shows you how to put what you have learned in Part I into action to meet the specific needs of your community.

Resources
This is where you'll find practical tools—including templates, checklists, and worksheets—to apply what you learned in Parts I and II to your own coalition’s efforts.