This innovative company empowers incarcerated people to reenter the workforce
- Cat Burchmore
- Mar 19, 2024
- 1 min read
Updated: Nov 21, 2024
Orijin—which makes a free learning platform for incarcerated people—is one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in the education sector.
Over the last 10 years, Orijin—previously known as American Prison Data Systems—has provided free courses and career readiness resources to nearly 100,000 people who are incarcerated in correctional facilities across the country. The B corporation’s work fits into a larger movement to empower the formerly incarcerated to reenter the workforce, especially as states have taken steps to seal criminal records and mitigate the barriers to employment faced by people with records.
Orijin’s free learning platform, which is accessible through the company’s own secure tablet computers, is now being used in more than 200 facilities across 17 states and Washington, D.C. In 2023, the company forged a partnership with the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, providing educational programming and career-readiness courses to 6,000 individuals in correctional institutions statewide; the partnership is one of the first of its kind to make such resources available to all incarcerated people in the state.
Orijin also released the results of a cloud certification pilot program implemented inside the D.C. Department of Corrections in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the type of training that could be directly applicable to tech jobs in the real world. The program’s participants scored a 85% pass rate on the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification exam.
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