A unique program gives formerly incarcerated people a Clark experience.
It’s tough being the boss.
Jordan Santiago has learned that lesson a dozen different ways since he opened Tru Image Barbershop in downtown Worcester last May. He knows that being the boss means getting customers in the door. It means fixing the leak in the ceiling and making payroll. It means arriving early, staying late, and meeting the moment while still planning for the future.
And it also means you’ve got to give a great haircut.
“You’re responsible for all of it,” Santiago says with a grin. “If something goes wrong, the only person you can call is yourself.”
It does help to have allies. Santiago found his through an innovative program at Clark University called Liberal Arts for Returning Citizens, or LARC. The program offers college-level courses to people who were once incarcerated, providing them with the knowledge and tools they need to launch careers, improve communication and critical thinking skills, and build life-enhancing capacities in areas like financial literacy and nutrition.
Santiago, who had served three months in the Worcester County House of Corrections, took several LARC classes, including Venture Startup with John Dobson, professor of practice in the Clark School of Business and co-director of LARC. The course helped crystallize for him the practical steps he’d need to establish his business, though the motivation and the approach would be all his own.
“The students come up with the ideas that resonate, and they have the agency and autonomy to implement them,” Dobson says. “My role as faculty is to focus on why they’re doing it, and not on how they’re doing it. Because we can fix the ‘how’ as long as we have a clear understanding of the ‘why.’ ”
For LARC co-founder and director Shelly Tenenbaum, a professor of sociology and genocide scholar, getting to the “why” around the creation of LARC meant learning about the people doing time behind the stone walls and barbed wire in the brooding state prisons that she passed on the highway. What were their stories? How was life inside those walls? Were re- sources available to them as they reentered life beyond prison?
She has spent the last eight years getting those questions an- swered by teaching inside prisons in Norfolk and Concord, Massachusetts, through programs run by Boston University and Emerson College, respectively.
Business owner and LARC alum Jordan Santiago at work in his Worcester barbershop
“I was able to take off my blinders after not even knowing my own biases against people who were incarcerated,” Tenenbaum says. “As I kept teaching, every single one of those biases was dispelled.”
Dobson was holding entrepreneurship workshops in the Main South neighborhood and in the Worcester County House of Corrections when he and Tenenbaum struck on the idea of starting Liberal Education for Returning Citizens. The duo received funding from a Clark Innovation Grant and recruited Jennifer Plante, associate dean of the college and director of the Writing Center, to launch LARC in fall 2022. Eight students enrolled in three courses: Venture Startup, Introduction to Written and Oral Communication, and Race and Autobiography.
As word of the program spread—including through probation, parole, and community reentry organizations—more students enrolled, more faculty members asked to teach classes, and offerings were expanded to include a mix of the humanities, social sciences, STEM, and foundational life skills. This year, LARC constitutes 13 seven-week classes during the fall, spring, and summer terms, serving 35 students in areas ranging from Sociology of Law to computer science, and offers three paid internships. While LARC students do not earn degrees by participating in LARC classes, students are awarded transferable credit for passing the courses. These credits may be transferable to Clark if students enroll in a degree-granting program, as well as to other colleges, community colleges, and universities.
LARC students are considered part-time Clark students, with access to University programs and facilities like the library, athletic center, and Writing Center. Special evening gatherings provide students a forum to read from their original writings and socialize with faculty and guests, like President David Fithian and Congressman James McGovern.
“Their skills were a little rougher than matriculating students, but their ideas were outstanding,” says Plante of the LARC students in her first communications class. “The mini-memoirs they wrote were so evocative.”
Plante, who serves on the LARC administrative team, says the students are united in one key aspect, “They are very excited to be students at Clark.”
No single LARC student is exactly like another. Some come into the program having spent a couple of months in a county jail; others have been incarcerated in state prison for decades. Some are intent on transforming their thoughts into words; others are looking to define a career path.
“These students have the grit. They have the resilience. They have the ideas.”
At every turn, Tenenbaum says, LARC seeks to remove obstacles that can impede a student’s progress. For instance, meals are provided to participants taking evening classes, and students receive a laptop after completing one course—in some cases it’s the first computer they’ve owned. “The bad experiences, bad memories, family issues, lack of full-time employment—there are many challenges that the students face, and we’re trying to eliminate at least whatever institutional barriers that we can,” she says. “It’s not just about teaching content, it’s about building confidence.”
If you ask John Dobson for a LARC success story, he’ll quickly come up with examples. Like Corey, one of his Venture Startup students, who sold coffee to sober homes, halfway houses, drop-in centers, and other places that support people in recovery. From there, he created a car-detailing business, and now owns successful home repair/renovation business.
“What I like about these stu- dents is that they have the work ethic,” Dobson says. “They have the grit. They have the resilience. They have the ideas.”
Before undertaking LARC, Dobson reached out to a psychologist colleague to better understand the behaviors of those who have been involved in the criminal justice system, and realized that entrepreneurship is ideal for channeling those behaviors in a positive direction.
“People crave respect; they crave affiliation and affirmation,” he says. “They want to know that what they’re doing is valuable for themselves and their community.”
Dobson has created four courses designed to achieve his students’ entrepreneurial aims: Venture Startup, Venture Growth, Food Truck Practicum, and Entrepreneurial Leadership.
“Over the course of seven weeks we see a number of these students progress really far,” he says. “The goal always is that they operate in a climate of creativity and innovation so that they can continue to come up with ideas to move their projects forward.”
LARC operates through a patchwork of foundational and state grants, though Tenenbaum hopes for a more stable funding stream. The program, she insists, is worth sustaining.
“We all mess up, some of us in bigger ways than others,” Tenenbaum says. “That’s why second chances are so important. And I’m very proud of Clark for being willing to give those second chances.”
Jackie’s Story
Lifelong learner
If she had a million dollars, Jacqueline “Jackie” Scott knows exactly what she would do with it.
“I would buy a big old house and just build bookcases all over the place,” she says. “It would be open to people just to come take a book, leave a book, read a book.”
It’s this love of the written word that attracted Scott to LARC, where she’s explored the life and times of Frederick Douglass, learned the art of autobiography writing, delved into the horrors of genocide, and studied ethics one-on-one with Harvard theologian Matthew Potts. Her original writings have been published in an online literary journal, and her observations have found their way into The Boston Globe’s op-ed pages.
Scott, 73, of Boston, describes herself as a “lifelong learner” with a fascination for history (David McCullough and Erik Larson are among her favorite authors). She has taken a LARC course every semester since the program started.
A retired paralegal, Scott spent three-and-a-half years in MCI-Framingham following “a moment that defined my life.”
“I lost everything because of my crime. Family included.
“When I came back, I didn’t expect to have the life I had before,” Scott says. “I just knew how difficult it was for returning citizens to integrate into the community and find people to accept us just as people.”
While investigating programs to help some of the women she tutored in MCI-Framingham, she saw a flyer advertising LARC. Intrigued, Scott reached out to Shelly Tenenbaum, who, after learning of Scott’s passions for reading, writing, and research, responded with five simple words: “This program is for you.”
And it will be, for as long as she chooses to be a part of it.
“I don’t see the end game,” Scott says of her participation in LARC, adding with a laugh, “other than Shelly runs out of people who want to play with me.”
Jordan’s Story
Hustle. Conquer.
Just as no two heads of hair are exactly alike, it wasn’t a certainty that Jordan Santiago would own a barbershop. But given his family track record—his brother and uncles were barbers—he seemed destined for the clippers.
He learned the trade and became talented at styling. For additional money, he operated a side business selling sneakers and clothes.
Santiago’s brief stint in county prison, followed by a job in a meat-packing plant, convinced him that he needed to bet on himself to have a meaningful future. When the opportunity arose to purchase a fire-damaged storefront on Pleasant Street in Worcester that had once been his brother’s barbershop, he seized it.
At the encouragement of his brother, Angel, also a LARC student, Santiago took several LARC courses—including computer science, which gave him proficiency with the Excel program that allows him to track his inventory and expenses.
“It’s been going good,” he says of Tru Image. “It has its ups and downs, but that’s part of life, right?” Among those “ups” is something that gives Santiago great pride.
“I knew how difficult it was to find people who accept us just as people.”
“A lot of kids from Clark come to get their hair cut,” he says, smiling. “It’s funny, because they’ve got to pass by at least five or six barbershops to get here. I like that.”
Posters hang on the wall above every one of his barber chairs, each containing a single word: Hustle. Success. Execution. Grind. Conquer. They are the inspirational shorthand for the Worcester man and LARC alum who is committed to the premise that he is building something of value here.
“People come in, and by the time they get out of the chair, they feel happy. We make people feel good about themselves,” Santiago says.
“Everything changes after a haircut.”
Nate’s Story
Entrepreneur
Nate Bethancourt acknowledges that he sometimes skips around in time when he tells a story, especially his own story. His ADHD, he says, can make linearity a challenge.
But Bethancourt’s focus, after a shaky start that included an early flirtation with gang life and a brief stretch in the Worcester County House of Corrections, is uncompromisingly true these days.
Bethancourt joined LARC at the start of the program in 2022, intrigued by the notion of returning to school after he’d taken some com- munity college classes. Seeking practical skills and creative inspiration, he’s since completed LARC courses in a wide array of subjects that have included oral and written communications, entrepreneurship, computer science, guitar, chemistry, philosophy, and songwriting.
In 2023, Bethancourt earned his way into Clark Tank, the annual event at which Clark students pitch their business ideas to potential investors. He didn’t win the competition, but the positive feedback he received for his fresh juice business idea helped supercharge his entrepreneurial instincts. Today, he owns and operates Health Ya’Self, through which he produces and sells cold-pressed juices in convenience stores and other locales as a healthy alternative to soda and energy drinks. He’s also a chef, with the goal of one day selling his juices from his own food truck.
The knowledge and expertise he’s received through LARC is helping him get there. Bethan- court has now chosen to serve on LARC’s Student Advisory Committee, working to find ways to improve the academic experience for others, especially for students who are new to the program.
“The professors are always going out of their way to make students feel welcome,” Bethancourt says. “The courses are intense, but you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
“When you feel their commitment to you, it makes it easier to stay committed to yourself.” □
