Mission and Values
Operating within the California State University system since 1967, Project Rebound has helped hundreds of individuals earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Project Rebound has a proven model to promote restorative justice, reduce recidivism, and empower individuals through higher education.
Mission
The mission of the CSU Project Rebound Consortium is to support the higher education and successful reintegration of the formerly incarcerated through mentorship and living examples of other formerly incarcerated students, graduates, faculty, and staff. Project Rebound constructs a life-affirming alternative to the revolving door policies of mass incarceration by making higher education more accessible and supportive of formerly incarcerated students so that they can acquire the knowledge and skills of a university education, enhance their capacity for civic engagement and community leadership, secure meaningful and gratifying employment, empower themselves and their families, and ultimately make stronger, safer communities.
Vision
We envision a just and equitable work in which all people, including those with an incarceration experience, have access to high-quality higher education and comprehensive student support services that foster achievement, transformation, empowerment, social responsibility and flourishing.
Guiding Values
- The Intrinsic Value of Persons. We believe that every person has inherent value and holds the power of possibility and transformation within them.
- Equitable Access to Education. We believe that access to meaningful, high-quality, face-to-face higher education is fundamental to breaking intergenerational cycles of poverty, abuse, addiction, unemployment, and confinement.
- Formerly Incarcerated Leadership. We believe that the integration, education, and leadership of formerly incarcerated people are essential to the work of creating solutions to the social crisis of mass incarceration.
- Education as Public Safety. We believe that meaningful, high-quality higher education ultimately makes stronger, safer communities; we believe that public resources are better invested in education and other opportunities for transformation than prisons and punishment.
- Civic Engagement. We believe that community engagement is at once a right, a responsibility, and a means of empowerment; we aim to inspire all Rebound Scholars to be informed and engaged civic agents.