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People's Paper Co-op: Making paper, poems - and a future

At the People's Paper Co-op, when one woman shares a story, the others empathize. Often, the narrative hits hard, and someone cries. As the tears stream down her face, fake eyelashes fall out of place. She turns to her orator-friend and claims, "Girl, you owe me some eyelashes."

At the People's Paper Co-op, when one woman shares a story, the others empathize. Often, the narrative hits hard, and someone cries. As the tears stream down her face, fake eyelashes fall out of place. She turns to her orator-friend and claims, "Girl, you owe me some eyelashes."

"There were lots of little things like that, like 'You owe me some eyelashes,' that really illustrated how tight these women were," said Yolanda Wisher, Philadelphia poet laureate. "They were like a family of sisters."

Wisher visited the co-op in May to lead a poetry workshop. She is one of many experts who have visited 2558 Germantown Ave., where Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist have set up a reentry initiative for ex-offenders that combines social advocacy with art.

The co-op was meant to be short-lived. In 2014, Bowles and Strandquist moved to Philly, supposedly for half a year, to lead an internship program for formerly incarcerated locals. They taught their team how to make paper and turn it into books, which they sold at stores and online.

Meanwhile, the co-op held sessions to teach members about reentry resources at their disposal. Bowles and Strandquist, self-described "weird white people" who have been arrested for minor offenses but never incarcerated in the long term, lived in North Philadelphia so they could get to know the neighborhood they were serving.

"It's a really hard-hit part of the city, and I think without being immersed in that space, it's hard to have any understanding of it," Bowles said.

The residency proved so successful the Village of Arts and Humanities decided to keep the co-op in its permanent programming. Faith Bartley, who participated in the pilot internship, stayed on as a lead fellow. "I didn't see it coming at all," she said. "I didn't know what my niche was. I just knew that I needed to do something different. I just took it and I ran with it, and I love what I do."

The first rendition was co-ed, but Bartley recommended that it be made female-only. Philly has few resources for women compared to men in reentry. She stressed the need for custody advice, grief counseling, and knowing your rights as an ex-offender.

"We had the sadly radical idea," Strandquist said, "that these resources should be designed by the women who are going to access them."

The first all-female class graduated this summer, after five months of working at the co-op three days a week. They spent about an hour a day making paper or books, but they devoted most of their time to creating a resource guide for women in reentry, which will launch in the fall. Medical, legal, and artistic professionals gave lectures each week, talking about resources in Philadelphia. They also provide material for the guide, a publication that combines practicalities with visual art and poems written during Wisher's workshop. Copies are distributed at prisons and service facilities.

The co-op paid interns a stipend. It also offered expungement clinics, in which people with records can investigate whether they can get some or all of those records erased. Prospective employers can search a database by name and date of birth and all charges appear, even those dropped in court. Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity tries to reduce hiring discrimination by teaching about the system and helping interns clear dropped felony charges from their records. Leigh Wicclair, an equal-justice work Americorp legal fellow for Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity, says a criminal record or even a record of being in court has an impact that "is so long-lasting."

Not every session is happy. State laws make it nearly impossible to clear convicted crimes, and according to Wicclair, few "know how limited expungement is. It often can be pretty disappointing when people come in and hear that." But when she visits, "it's all smiles and fun." The interns, she says, have taught her "so much about the strength of the human spirit."

alexandraevillarreal@gmail.com.