Google awards $150,000 grant to Ardella’s House, supporting women’s reentry

Maria Báez was the last speaker at a reception Monday afternoon announcing a $150,000 grant from Google for Ardella’s House, a women’s reentry program.

Báez, who had been supported by Ardella’s House when she left prison more than two years ago, has just enrolled at Community College of Philadelphia. “It makes me hope,” she said. “Our past don’t dictate what we are going to be. Now I want a second chance to do the things I didn’t used to value. A second chance at school. I don’t want to be judged by my felonies.”

That, according to Winton Steward, head of Public Policy and External Affairs for Google, is the reason the company donated the unrestricted funds for the work of Ardella’s House to continue. It is the reentry program’s largest grant to date, and it is part of the $48 million Google has donated to criminal justice reform since 2015.

“[In Pennsylvania,] over 64% of formerly incarcerated people return to prison within three years of release. We want to help more formerly incarcerated women reach their goal,” Steward said.

“Some women need a second, third, fourth, fifth chance,” said Tonie Willis, founder of Ardella’s House, which includes a residential facility in North Philadelphia that opened last October. “We don’t believe in throwing away people.”

Willis originally started Ardella’s House in 2010 as a program to help women leaving prison reintegrate into society, but she wanted to add a residential component and designed Ardella’s House to look like a home and not an institutional facility. “You can’t accomplish anything if you don’t have a clean place to live,” Willis said.

Willis spent more than a decade trying to turn her vision for a beautiful halfway house into a reality, talking to anyone who would listen. “Sometimes I would feel so depressed I would cry,” she told The Inquirer in July. Acknowledging all of Willis’ supporters who crammed into Ardella’s House at Monday’s announcement, Steward said, “Google is here for Tonie, too.”

In addition to the Google announcement, City Councilman Curtis Jones said the city would be giving Ardella’s House $50,000 to support its efforts.

Each day, about 200 women are released from prison across the country and often arrive back to their home communities with little more than the clothes on their backs. “Hundreds of women are being released and they have no place to go. Either they can’t go back or they don’t want to go back,” Báez said.

Naja Fleming, Ardella’s House’s first resident, told the crowd that traditional halfway houses feel “like another part of the [prison] system.”

Fleming spent five years at the State Correctional Institution at Muncy. When she was released, her intended living facility did not have gas or hot water. She was told she had to find another place to live, which made her depressed and anxious. Living at Ardella’s House changed that. “My overall mental health, I’m not stressed with my living conditions. I have a sense of peace that goes above and beyond,” Fleming said.

Women are the fastest growing incarcerated population, and from 2009 to 2016 their recidivism rate increased more than 13%, which is often related to a lack of services and support systems after they leave prison. Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton, a former public defender, said that the criminal justice system doesn’t make the path forward easy for women. “Women are in need of support and flexibility.”

Willis said her next goal is to provide resources to keep women from going to prison for nonviolent offenses and workforce development programming. “Women are making $9 per hour. You can’t take care of yourself on that.”