Neighborhood Leader Helps Incarcerated People Give Back
While serving a 15-year sentence, Kyle Gonzalez began working with other men in prison to find ways to give back to their home communities. They called their program “Beyond the Bars.”
While Kyle Gonzalez was serving a 13-year sentence, he often thought about ways to give back to his community, and to find ways for his friends and fellow inmates to do the same.
When a friend began a project called “Soaps for Hope,” collecting soaps in prison to send to a Hartford homeless shelter, Gonzalez quickly got involved, expanding the idea to include book donations, and to enlist local small businesses in the efforts.
Gonzalez donated the surplus of books he had collected through his time earning a bachelor’s degree with the Yale Prison Education Initiative, as well as books from the Second Chance Education Alliance. He then contacted Possible Futures, the bookstore in Edgewood, where owner Lauren Anderson was eager to support. The bookstore would serve as an outpost for donations of books, soaps and other essentials. Over two days, a group assembled care packages that were delivered to shelters in the area.
“Afterwards, Addy sent pictures to me of the event, and I showed everybody who participated and who donated – and everybody felt so good. I knew right then, this is what we’re going to do: give the space and support to help you organize yourself and affect change in your community.”
This, he decided, was Beyond the Bars. Now, as a member of the 2026 cohort of the Neighborhood Leadership Program, Gonzalez will receive the tools, connections and grant support to help develop the project. The Neighborhood Leadership Program at The Community Foundation supports local residents of New Haven, West Haven, East Haven or Hamden with projects aimed at improving or creating meaningful change in their neighborhoods or communities, like Beyond the Bars.
“Beyond the Bars is a space for people who are incarcerated to connect with community and to give back,” Kyle explains.
Currently, Kyle is working with five “team visionaries,” and is in contact with at least 13 others with project ideas.
He notes that, while he hopes these projects will help team visionaries build connections should their sentences be overturned or modified, Beyond the Bars doesn't venture into reentry: “This is for people who are serving life sentences to connect with and assist nonprofit organizations, grassroots organizations or small businesses in the communities they come from.”
For Gonzalez, this connection to place or to home is crucial.
“It's network building. It forces you into a space of communication, and I think that the value it adds to their life, whether they know it or not at first, when they see the support they get and that they’ve built, it’s beautiful.”
Evan is developing a cleanup initiative in his hometown of New London. Anthony is planning a Mother’s Day event at Possible Futures to honor his late mother.
“He lost his mother to breast cancer while he was incarcerated, so he wants to tie breast cancer awareness with Mother's Day.”
Allen Hall is one team visionary working on the project Kyle has titled Ten Toes Down, donating socks and other essentials to residents at halfway houses and group homes. Gonzalez garnered donations of dozens of pairs of Bombas socks both from Gloria McComas, a Yale student and Dwight Hall staffer, as well as Kendall Washington, at Dwight Hall's UHOPE Haven.
“Allen wants to donate to group homes, but also to raise awareness about the conditions within group homes. If you look, reviews will say the conditions at a lot of these group homes are terrible, but on their website and flyers, there are pictures of everybody having fun. So there's a disconnect there. Through his project, we get to state that we're next to you, we're with you, ten toes down.”
Through Beyond the Bars, and the projects it supports, Gonzalez hopes to change public perception about incarcerated people, and reform the ways they are supported throughout reentry.
“It's about really affecting change against the negative outlook, against the negative push.”
Gonzalez was denied parole because, he was told, he failed to complete an anger management requirement, even though Kyle completed a course around alternative violence that he says met the requirement.
“I want to show that the way we define rehabilitation, through the Offender Accountability Plan, is inherently flawed.”
Currently, Gonzalez is completing his capstone project at the Yale Prison Education Initiative to help untangle some of these gaps he sees in both policy and public understanding. “What is rehabilitation? Why not higher education or community outreach projects? Those two things by themselves reduce recidivism to 0%. Add in another component of actual communal love, of real resources, and what does that do?”
For Kyle, it’s a practice of showing over telling. “We can show them together; through Beyond the Bars, a bunch of us who are passionate about community projects, passionate about higher education, come together and just execute good work.”
