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Named after the carrier pigeons of old, delivering messages to far-away places, The Carrier Pigeon Post newspaper provides hope through stories and education.
CPP transforms the lives of those presently and formerly incarcerated by imparting cultural literacy. Cultural literacy (CL) integrates people and advances their opportunities within their own society. CL includes familiarity with history, literature, art, music, religion, and language. These are essential for effective communication and for prospering within one’s own culture. Cultural literacy assumes innate, unspoken knowledge from childhood. But for many, this is not the case. CPP intervenes to correct this problem.
Story-based cultural literacy encourages those formerly incarcerated to imagine an alternative future and take ownership of their own destiny. This imagining and ownership are proven enablers of self-efficacy (the belief that one can change their future). Self-efficacy results in post-prison desistance (the avoidance of crime). CPP translates cultural literacy into cultural confidence and competency, leading to not just surviving, but thriving, in post-prison life.
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The Carrier Pigeon Post begins with the individual and is a decided and focused attempt to address the disparity between those who possess a cultural literacy and those who do not. CPP is handcrafted to evade the systemic issues that perpetuate the disparity in cultural literacy.
CPP’s focus upon social equity does not mean it does not value social justice. It is just that CPP does not presume to address the larger systemic issues of incarceration. CPP instead seeks to address a small but powerfully important disparity.
Those suffering incarceration are excluded from the culture they desire to join because they suffer from cultural illiteracy. CPP rights this wrong of disparity one story at a time, one paper at a time.
CPP is easy to distribute, overcoming issues of accessibility
CPP is free, overcoming the politics of reluctance
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CPP’s architecture as print, small, portable, personal, private overcomes the limiting challenges of incarceration life
CPP is written to a 6th grade level, overcoming the lack of academic formation.
Traditional education programing inside of prisons is costly, underutilized, and principally seeks cognitive objectives.Reentry organizations focus upon practical behaviors and therapeutic issues. CPP complements these efforts, even sharing with them the goals of repair,remediation, and transformation. But CPP values empowerment. It does so because empowerment sparks the personal and social goods of self-esteem, self-respect, self-reliance,self-determination, productivity, resistance, pride, ownership.
CPP believes cultural literacy empowers social confidence as well as cultural competency.
CPP is a small thing. Little. Seemingly inconsequential. But great things almost always begin as small things. And CPP believes in how the small can work the impossible. It seems foolish to believe that a simple 8 pages of small narratives about paintings, sculpture, professional photography, global historic landmarks, language, celebrities, athletes, political figures, literature, historical events, multicultural folktales, even finance, economics, and science, can empower, inspire hope, and foster creativity.
But that is exactly what CPP does. Miracles are found in the strangest of places—or maybe not so strange, as this is what the arts have been doing all along.
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