Creative reentry partnerships work best when they are built around a real person’s path, not just a program description. Gabriel Singer is a good example. He is an artist featured in the RBI marketplace, and according to RBI founder Jason Bell, someone Jason considers a colleague as well as a vendor.

Gabriel’s own account of his path shows why partnerships matter so much in this work. He recently completed a paid internship through California Lawyers for the Arts’ Designing Creative Futures program, placed with the William James Association as his host site. In his own words, shared on WJA’s site, the experience broadened his sense of what he could do as an artist and helped him understand what it would take to build the career he wants.

Gabriel’s involvement does not stop there. He also currently serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Annual Review of Criminal Justice Studies, the same student-led journal covered in our recent piece on reentry stigma. It is a reminder that the people behind reentry work are often connected across more than one program at once.

None of that happens through a single organization working alone. It takes a legal aid group, an arts nonprofit, a marketplace willing to feature the work, and time. That is the model RBI believes in: not one solution, but a network of people and programs that all treat the work as the starting point, not the record.