Artists Laura Cerón Melo, Jenny Polak, and Russell Craig worked with the Creative Arts Program at The Fortune Society to offer artistic opportunities to participants and staff, increasing the program’s internal capacity and changing the organization’s perception of the arts program and its impact. The collaboration led two Arts Festivals that collectively welcomed nearly 3,000 New Yorkers to Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, in addition to launching a studio residency at MoMA PS1, which culminates in an exhibition in the museum opening November 14, 2024. They also designed and edited a book of poetry, drafted a way-finding system for the organization’s main service center, helped to co-lead a sneaker design workshop, created a mural, and released a spoken word and music album. They held weekly art making workshops where more than 100 Fortune community members took part. The creative skills of the artists were fundamental to expanding the Program’s visual imagination, while promoting and building organizational processes and structures that visibly improved the well-being of the whole community. The partnership was rooted in the shared values of radical love, reciprocity, authenticity, and open and equitable creative exchange, while centering community-building.

The Fortune Society’s mission is to support successful reentry from incarceration and promote alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of its communities. The Creative Arts community at Fortune aligns with radical hope and believes in the healing and transformative powers of imagination and creativity.