The Domino Effect: How Five Keys and Other Programs like Five Keys Inspire Generational Change

As a young child, Romina Bonilla, along with her parents and four sisters immigrated from Oaxaca, Mexico to South Central, Los Angeles in 1989.

It did not go unnoticed to Romina’s parents that education was a lifeline in underserved communities of color. Her parents took advantage of the ESL courses offered locally. They were both able to obtain their GEDs that essentially forged a new path for her parents and launched the five sisters on their own successful career paths.

Education had a domino effect on Romina’s family. Once their parents made the first move, there was a chain reaction with her sisters.

Today, inspired by her parents’ resilience and grit — and the educational opportunities that turned their American Dream into a reality, Romina is an ESL teacher for Five Keys. Her oldest sister attended UCLA’s medical school and is an anesthesiologist. Another sister is an electrical engineer, another a social worker, and her youngest sister just graduated high school with a 3.8 GPA.

“Programs like Five Keys give people a second chance at reaching hopes and dreams they might not have been able to reach at a younger age due to life circumstances,” says the 34-year-old mother of two young children. She is married to Jose Sanchez, who is also an employee at Five Keys. They live in Downey, CA. Romina currently teaches at Five Keys’ Weber Community Center in South Los Angeles, while her husband works as an Assessment and Technology Specialist out of Five Keys’ main office in Boyle Heights.

After obtaining his GED, Romina’s father, Vincente Bonilla, opened a TV repair business. After hard times, he closed his business but still remains employed full time as a technician. Her mother, Araceli Gorostieta, chose to stay at home to raise her five daughters but also became an active volunteer at the Hope Street Margolis Family Center, a health, education and recreation program of Dignity Health California Hospital Medical Center. It has been recognized as a national model for integrating healthcare within its community of downtown Los Angeles. At Hope Street, her mom immersed herself with parenting courses, eventually becoming a parent leader and mentor.

Romina paid close attention to her mother’s role modeling. The organization also caught a young Romina’s attention because she realized she wanted to give back to her community as she saw Hope Street’s mission guided her mom to do. This drew her closer to Five Keys and how it partners with the Homeless Outreach Program Integrated Care System, El Nido Family Centers, and the WorkSource Centers, all in Los Angeles County, to help students with their goals.

 “Five Keys looks at students in a more holistic manner than your traditional school setting. We see people as wholes and understand that you cannot instill true intrinsic change by simply giving students packets of homework to complete and get graded on. You have to provide them with meaningful educational experiences that spark them with moments of reflection and eventually personal growth,” said Romina.

What she especially loves about teaching at Five Keys is the strong relationships teachers build with students and connecting them to opportunities they might not otherwise know exist during school and even after graduation. From helping students apply to college, to connecting them with scholarship opportunities, to offering the welding training program at Weber Community Center which serves as a great start to a potential new career path for students, she says.

Romina, who graduated from California State University LA, worked for the adult division of education for the Los Angeles Unified School District as an ESL teacher in 2009. She joined Five Keys in 2012 and taught ESL at Pitchess Detention Center.

“My experiences teaching in-custody molded me into a better teacher,” she says. “Learning about restorative justice taught me about empathy. I really think that before I began working here, I only knew what sympathizing is. But after engaging and continuously learning at Five Keys and having other interactions with the diverse student and teacher population I work with, I truly began to understand and appreciate other people's feelings and experiences.”

She adds: “I love what I do because I see the effect we have on students who are used to people merely sympathizing with them and walking away instead of empathizing and actually lending them a hand up,” she says. “This is what Five Keys does and this is what Hope Street did for my family. Without this support I have no idea where my family and I would be. We will carry our experiences with us in our hearts with lots of gratitude for the rest of our lives.”

Her advice for people considering becoming students at Five Keys?

“Just do it! Five Keys is a door. All we need from students is to open it and our teachers will guide you with the rest! Who knows, maybe making this move will be the domino effect to a better future for their family and future generations to come.”

Vital Signs of Success

Five Keys first stop on lifetime dream to be a nurse

For Ileah Ruffinelli-Tatum of Lancaster, CA, Five Keys is a family affair.

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles as one of 10 kids, she and her siblings didn’t have the opportunity to finish high school. But now, at 30, she’s a semester away from getting her diploma in December 2020, right behind her sister who graduated in March, and two of her brothers who are working and attending Five Keys.

Her study buddies: daughters AJ’Sha, 12, and La’Ryah, 10, who are super excited about their mom’s plans to transition from working in a nail salon and her dad’s construction company to her dream since she was 10 to become a nurse.

“My girls are very supportful of me and we all do our homework/classwork together at the table,” she says.  “Some days I do get discouraged, or overwhelmed and my daughters along with my husband, parents, and siblings, quickly remind me to stop over thinking, stop being lazy and finish. They tell me I have greatness in me and they believe in me. My daughters say the very same encouragement that I give them daily and it always bring tears to my eyes and my heart starts to flutter.”

Since she was a child helping to care for her grandmother who had Alzheimer’s, Ileah has wanted to become a nurse.

But an abusive marriage, and the pursuit of many gigs to support her children – stylist in a nail and hair salon, massage therapist, car mechanic, seamstress, painter and construction work for her father’s business — showcased her myriad talents and made her a jack of all trades, but never fulfilled her yearning to pursue a nursing career.

Remarried and hoping to be a strong role model for her daughters, just as her parents and grandmother were for her, she says she feels blessed that her daughters and new husband are championing her full-time enrollment in Five Keys.

“I started caring for people at the very young age of 11 when I helped my mother take care of my grandmother, feeding her, cleaning and changing her, anything you can think of we did it,” she says. “We had help from my great aunt and siblings — even my dad. Also, I helped my ex father-in-law before he passed away. He was on dialysis — both legs from the knees down amputated and had many other medical conditions.”

At one point she worked in an assisted living facility for the elderly, but had to leave due to some of her own medical issues at the time.

“Five keys helped my siblings and myself gain our confidence back that we can have a second chance in life,” she says. “We can gain our diplomas and still be able to pursue a career, and not just get a low paying job just to get by. We all have children and it helps us to tell our stories and they can watch us firsthand, how we all detoured but still found our way back to the starting point but is now able and have crossed the finish line.”

She says an acquaintance told her about the program.

“I'm so grateful because I struggled for years trying to work and go to school,” she says. “I never found the right school for me but Five Keys is.  I would recommend Five Keys to anyone who wants to make a step to bettering their life or just to have that closure that you finished something they started.  It’s crazy that a piece of paper validates a person's life.  But it is all worth it in the end. It's never how you start but it's all about how you finish.” 

Pomp and Pandemic Circumstances Behind Bars

Graduating the Class of 2020 Incarcerated Students

Five Keys continues educating incarcerated adult high school seniors amidst COVID-19

As high school seniors across the country hold drive-through, ZOOM and other socially distanced graduation ceremonies, Tiara Arnold, 27, celebrated her own graduation milestone, albeit alone in her cell at Alameda County Santa Rita Jail, in Dublin, CA. She’s been quarantined since March to reduce the risk of a coronavirus outbreak. 

“I’m super excited and I keep saying to myself, ‘I did it. I did it,’’’ said Arnold, who was arrested at age 17, placed in maximum security at Santa Rita, moved to a prison and is back on appeal. “When I got arrested, my life was really going in the wrong direction. I was really distracted and made a lot of poor decisions. But while life was progressing for everyone else, I didn’t go to prom, I didn’t graduate from high school and I didn’t get to do the one thing my mom asked me to do which was to get my high school diploma. I was in the worst place my life could be. But now, since people invested so much in me and helped me believe in myself, I am determined to lead a life that is meaningful and helpful to others. I plan to go to college and hope to help my mom with her business and help other at-risk kids who are struggling.”

Thanks to the creativity and exceptional adjustments of our teachers and principals at Five Keys and local sheriff’s departments, Arnold’s experience underscores that of other incarcerated students who are graduating from high school at the Alameda County jail and custody facilities in San Francisco and Sonoma County. This is despite COVID-19 challenges to education and roadblocks exacerbating the disruption: prisoners do not have access to the Internet, so unlike traditional high schools, they could not immediately shift their curriculums online.  

When the coronavirus started to spread, teachers, principals and corrections officers faced a dilemma – how to continue educating incarcerated students as jails shut down and education for most students in traditional schools moved online. It was a significant pivot, as getting a high school degree reduces a person’s likelihood of re-incarceration by 43 percent, according to a report by the RAND Corporation.

“It’s an amazing accomplishment for the students who really took on the extra challenges, like being locked down in their cells and not being able to meet with their teachers on-site, to push through and get across the graduation finish line,” said Lillian Stables, principal at Five Keys for the Alameda County jail site. 

For nearly two months now, our teachers have engaged students through self-paced programs and alternative learning, by delivering packets of the curriculum to the jails and pushing incarcerated students to study independently. 

“We just had to get creative and sent in letters of support and homework and in my case, I just told my students that they can call me when they needed extra help so we can get them into this home stretch,” said Rose Kleiner, a teacher at San Francisco County Jail #4, at 850 Bryant Street in San Francisco. “Even in the best of times, it can be daunting for them, but now the teachers can’t come in and they can’t see their families and are confined to their cells. That makes it pretty tough.”

But the inmates who are defying the odds and graduating this month “are a tenacious and resourceful bunch,” said Lisa Paoloni, a teacher at Sonoma County’s two jail facilities, which typically hold 1,050 to 1,100 inmates. 

Five Keys teachers sprang into action to figure out how to provide remote learning for students and most teachers scrambled (and continue to) to create a detailed COVID-19 overhaul of their curricula.  

“We met with the teachers and coordinators at the facilities – everyone we could – to try to brainstorm how are we going to do this when both the teachers are sheltering in place and the students are on lockdown,” said Kris Davison, also a teacher at Sonoma County’s jails.

At the Alameda County jail, principal Stables and an administrative assistant are admitted into the jail to bring the educational packets to students who are in the high school program. In some cases, like in the San Francisco jails, the custody facility staff arranged for phone calls where individual students could meet with their teachers and for course materials to be dropped off for students, then picked up to be graded by teachers — an elaborately staged system to meet COVID-19 safety standards. The packets undergo a thorough content screening process and are given to the representative at the jail where they sit for three days (for safety issues) and are then handed over to the inmates.  Each student receives a personal packet tailored to his or her educational curriculum.

The response from the inmates has been powerful. 

“One of my students sent me a letter in return that said, ‘You have no idea how much it meant to me to get your letter and to know someone cares,’” said Davison. 

Five Keys offers secondary education at jails across California, in “normal times,” sending faculty to teach in-person classes. Unlike traditional high schools, classes are held year-round, because the life of inmates/students is so transitional. To accommodate short sentences, classes are offered year-round in intensive, one-month semesters, allowing students to earn credits more quickly.

Above and Beyond: Homeless Center staffs are the Unsung Heroes on the Front Lines of COVID-19 in San Francisco

On a Saturday afternoon in the time abyss known as COVID-19, one of the homeless guests at the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center went into labor and was transported to a San Francisco hospital to give birth to her new baby. The next day, a long-time couple stepped out in the courtyard between the two gray bunker dormitories at the waterfront center to say: “I do now.” They tied the knot to the cheers of a handful of (socially distanced) guests. In the two weeks that have followed, the staff at Bayshore Navigation center and at the city’s temporary hotel quarters for the homeless have raced to the rescue of two different guests who were overdosing outside on the street. Administering CPR and Narcan, they reversed the overdoses, giving both patients more time for paramedics to get them to the hospital. They saved their lives. 

At a time when a terrorist called COVID-19 has stopped the world in its tracks, the staff at The Embarcadero and Bayshore Navigation centers and other SF CBO city partners are answering the call to care for the community of unsheltered homeless. 

Currently, Five Keys Navigation Center staff have been deployed to four additional shelters across San Francisco. As of June 8, 50 more employees will be added to man shelters at three hotels and the Moscone Center, in addition to the Bayshore and Embarcadero shelters. Of Five Keys’ 600-plus employees, 200 of them now serve people experiencing homelessness.

The silver lining: the glimpses of light that shine through in moments big and small — a new life in the birth of a baby, love in a time of coronavirus, and the saving of two lives. 

“Our navigation team and our fellow CBOs are not just staffing these emergency shelters, they are literally saving lives,” said Steve Good, executive director of Five Keys, which has became a SWAT team tapped to work alongside San Francisco’s public health supervisors and homeless advocates to dramatically reduce density in crowded shelters.

Call them homeless first responders. “When we talk about heroes, our navigation team and the city’s workers helping the homeless are full of them.”

Good called Five Keys‘ navigation center employees and others manning the homeless shelters in San Francisco “the unsung heroes of the pandemic.” 

In the best of times, providing food, shelter, and safety to San Francisco’s homeless population is a challenge. But as the COVID-19 outbreak continues, efforts have become more extreme. 

But through San Francisco’s safety efforts, more than 900 homeless people have been moved into hotel rooms and a pop-up shelter at Moscone West, as the city struggles to keep the pandemic from racing through its 8,000-strong unhoused population. Specifically, Five Keys was named by San Francisco city leaders to supervise operations at Site 10, a 450-room hotel in the city’s center that is housing 360 guests that were formerly in shelters but are most vulnerable to COVID-19 because of age or preexisting medical conditions. 

“Unlike many of us, our residents experiencing homelessness cannot simply close their doors to this disease, and that’s why San Francisco has ramped up efforts to de-escalate transmission of this disease within shelters, and ultimately save lives,” said Good. “Though no one is immune to COVID-19, this pandemic has all too clearly revealed the voids in our society and serves as a wake-up call on the life-and-death urgency of taking care of the most vulnerable in our population.”

 Like nurses and doctors, the individuals on the front lines of San Francisco’s homeless centers and now the hotel shelters, are risking their lives, said Good. He says from the start, the can-do attitude among Five Keys employees has been: "Whatever it takes. Sign me up."

It is no surprise that Five Keys and other service providers were called in by city public health leaders to aid in the massive efforts to marshal safety and shelter for the homeless in the face of this deadly terrorist, COVID-19.

Since 2003, we have been committed to getting the lives of people on the margins of society back on track — behind the walls of 23 county jails, in economically isolated communities, at two navigation centers for the unsheltered homeless, and more than 100 sites throughout San Francisco and Southern California.

Five Keys’ navigation center directors like Meg O’Neill, who has been deployed to head operations at Site 10 hotel and the more than 100 other Five Keys employees who directly serve the homeless are true COVID-19 first responders. At the hotel and the navigation centers, they supervise teams that not only feed, shelter and provide education for guests, but respond to fights, seizures, overdoses, and episodes tied to addiction and mental illness. They de-escalate each situation and stabilize people until medical personnel arrives, when necessary. 

In many ways, the Five Keys’ team’s nimbleness and ability to race toward the chaos of COVID-19 is because of the staff’s firsthand experiences in confronting trauma and the resilience and grit they have gained in their personal lives, said Good. 

“Many of our staff in our navigation centers have spent serious time in prison and bring a very unique calm and ability to get through during a time of crisis like this,” said Good. “At the same time, they are putting their own lives at great risk. But they do it because they have a tremendous passion and determination to give back and serve.”

Employee Spotlight: Dave Bates, Director of Transitional Employment and Re-entry for Five Keys Schools and Programs in Los Angeles

Wired with Compassion: Protecting and Transitioning the Formerly Incarcerated

A 27-year veteran of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department, Dave Bates saw an egregious number of cases in which suspects were booked, charged in drug, burglary or family violence cases, then released years later and sent back to jails and prisons charged with the same or new crimes.

“It was a revolving door,” says Bates.

Shortly after he retired from his almost three-decade public service career, the opportunity popped up to launch Five Keys’ already successful San Francisco inmate reentry program in Los Angeles, Bates jumped at the opportunity. That was six years ago. “Retirement, what is that?” the 50-something husband and father of two young adult sons asked himself at the time.

For Bates, who served as a senior deputy in the jail, patrolman, and an educator in public and private schools, it is a calling to support this vulnerable population.

“I’ve got a heart for women and men coming out of prison and how difficult it is for them on their release,” says Bates, who grew up in Northern California. “When I learned that Five Keys was helping these people transition back into society for hopefully the last time, I fell in love with the program. I had to be part of it.” 

As Director of Transitional Employment and Reentry for Five Keys in Los Angeles, he’s been leading the team who are the people former inmates can trust, and who prepare them for jobs and provide resources for them in the real world. 

Bates’ devotion to changing lives is stalwart. He is the chair and co-founder of the Community Action Partnership (CAP) alliance, a group of organizations across Southern California that have an interest in reentry efforts. They focus is on education, housing, drug treatment, expungement, job development and any resource that helps a returning citizen as they adjust back into the community. Bates also serves as a board member for the Los Angeles Mission Foundation, which provides three meals every day, emergency and overnight services and is dedicated to the business of restoring individual lives.

He says, now, more than ever, the coronavirus pandemic has left formerly incarcerated people at particular risk, navigating increased exposure with scant resources for protection and lacking the necessities to navigate the difficulties of day-to-day life. As California releases thousands of prisoners early in the hopes of slowing the spread of coronavirus within the inmate population, Bates, an advocate for the homeless asks: What happens to those individuals as they attempt to transition back into their communities?

The one silver lining: “There are a lot of people getting out of jail who didn’t deserve to be there in the first place.”

With an internal moral compass that points him in the direction to care, Bates and his Five Keys peers have helped more than 600 men and women transition back into society and find some sort of work. Jobs range from clerking at a dozen Rouses supermarkets throughout the Los Angeles area, and staffing the innovative Pit Stop, Shower Stop and the Cal Crew road crew programs run by Five Keys. 

The mobile Pit Stop facilities are popular attractions in Skid Row, where now with COVID-19, the need for sanitary conditions has become paramount. Not only does the program bring employment for the formerly incarcerated individuals who staff the facilities, the service brings some measure of dignity and privacy to the lives of the unhoused population. 

Another more recent and exciting Five Keys project he is leading and is passionate about is the Cal Crew that is dedicated to cleaning the parks, beaches and campsites that were ravaged by the fires outside of LA. 

As a police officer, Bates was in the field of helping people out. But now, at Five Keys, he has experienced an even deeper empathy for humankind.

“I used to maybe look at someone acting out and my quick reaction would be ‘what the hell is wrong with this guy,” says Bates. “But now I know that we never quite know what someone is dealing with. They could be living check to check and were just evicted. I am just reminded not to jump to assumptions. I like the fact that now I am in a role to help people get to where they need to go.”

Recently he helped a young woman who came from a broken relationship, gained her sobriety and was just out of jail. She had been sleeping in her car at a store parking lot. Employing her through Five Keys, Bates and his team helped her find one of the tiny homes that are rented for $300 a month by area churches.“ This was her 4th, 5th or 6th chance, but she was determined she was not going back,” says Bates. “Our hope is that we’ve helped move her toward a new future.”

Though he is passionate about and committed to the long hours he invests in, Bates is finding that COVID and some of the self-distancing he and his family are experiencing has re-ignited his love of oil painting, golf, and cooking. 

“But mostly I just love this job. Helping is the way I’m wired,” he says. 

Outfitting the front line: COVID-19 RESPONSE SERVING OUR COMMUNITY

Five Keys employees worked nimbly — and outside of their expertise — to answer the global call for personal protective equipment

Did Karla Munoz expect to spend spring in the shield-making business? Not a chance. An administrative assistant at Five Keys’ Los Angeles office, she stepped up to the task when Five Keys put out the call to all staff in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic about a critical need for masks for all staff and guests at the San Francisco Navigation Centers. Working with her stepdaughter into the wee hours of the mornings, the duo produced 800 masks, and over the following weekend, they whipped up another 1,000. 

Like a lot of Five Keys staff sheltering-in-place, she found herself wanting to do something to help. Plus, she was inspired because this is "hitting close to home." Her husband's brother in Oregon and his wife and two little girls all had COVID-19.

"We're lucky because we can stay at home, but I really wanted to find a way to help during this,” says Munoz. “My husband went to the store to get six-packs of the towels and we've just focused on making as many as we can."

Five Keys community members are opening their hearts with little hesitation

“The response and love for our communities is unbelievable and truly inspiring,” says Steve Good, Executive Director.  

In pockets across the state of California, more than 550 quarantined Five Keys employees are busily cutting rectangles of cotton fabric and sewing them into face masks. 

Volunteers like Munoz, and “Ms. Nan,” a math teacher at  San Francisco County Jail #5, in San Bruno, are working nimbly — and outside of their expertise — to answer the global call for personal protective equipment (PPE).  The ranks of these entrepreneurial seamstresses include the sheltered at home staffers from teachers at Five Keys Charter who work in partnership with the City College of San Francisco and San Francisco State University to career technical and vocational trainers who work with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the jail teachers. 

A teacher at Five Keys for four years, Ms. Nan jumped into action when the call for masks came to Five Keys staff. Immediately, she sent her husband Chris, a contractor also sheltering at home, to the hardware store for the heavy towels to create the staple version of the masks together. The duo hunkered down at their kitchen table and in less than 24 hours had produced 270 masks, which they delivered to the Bayshore Navigation Center by 3 p.m. the next day.

“It felt so good during this weird time to be able to do something positive to help,” she says. “I was feeling stunned and worried about our colleagues and guests at the navigation centers and wanted to do something positive.” 

By mid-April, Five Key staffers had created more than 6,000 masks and counting. The majority of the masks were delivered for the 260 guests and 80 staff members at the Bayshore Navigation Center and Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center in San Francisco. Another 1,500 were delivered to the LA Dream Center.

“The show must go on, but we were urgently in need of face masks to keep our staff and guests healthy,” says Tony Chase, director of the Bayshore Navigation Center. “We’re racing around trying to do all we can do, but the masks are coming in and helping us with the safety issues. It is in times like this that we see the amazing dedication of our staff that is keeping these centers open and the others that are working incredibly quickly to get these masks to us.”

Meantime, at the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center, the 126 guests there also pitched in to make hand sanitizer from a homemade recipe the staff scouted on YouTube, says Patricia Richard, Director of Navigation Centers.

“We are committed that these centers will not shut down during these desperate times, and we are grateful for the overwhelming dedication of our staff who are at home learning how to sew and making these masks,” Richard says.

Partnership with Insight Prison Project

Five Keys and Insight Prison Project Are Partnering to Expand Trauma-Informed Learning for Inmates 

Having spent nearly 40 years pioneering ways to change lives through trauma-informed education in correctional facilities across California, Five Keys recently partnered with the Insight Prison Project to leverage both organizations’ experience and enhance ways to help inmates come out of prison better than when they entered.

“Now more than ever we need to form partnerships to pool resources in this pandemic,” said Steve Good, executive
director for Five Keys.

“We are excited to merge with the Insight Prison Project to expand our reach and resources that help transform the lives of inmates in California and beyond. Both of our organizations have great experience providing educational programs that build trust, acknowledge each person’s dignity and empower individuals to take advantage of opportunities that can change the trajectory of their lives — and help them to engage differently with their worlds.”

Through the partnership, the Insight Prison Project will run under the umbrella of Five Keys, which began in 2003 in the San Francisco County Jail as the first charter school for incarcerated adults in the country. Its pioneering programs serve more than 4,000 people a day and have awarded more than 2,800 high school diplomas or GED equivalents. It is touted for shutting the revolving door of inmates going in and out of jail. 

Insight Prison Project, based in San Rafael, offers an innovative restorative justice program, the Victim Offender Education Group, which focuses on transformational re-education. It serves 300 incarcerated persons in California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington. It will continue to operate and grow its transformational programs for prisoners and parolees, which are supported by crime victims and community volunteers. 

“This is a perfect fit for both organizations who work to prepare people to come home and contribute to society by leading productive lives that cause no harm to others or themselves,”

said Leonard Rubio, executive director of the Insight Prison Project. 

Since 1997, the Insight Prison Project has been dedicated to reducing recidivism rates and improving public safety by conducting highly effective in-prison rehabilitation programs that provide prisoners with the tools and life skills necessary to create durable change. www.InsightPrisonProject.org.

We Stand by Our Community, Now and Always

To the Five Keys Community:

As people across the nation are hurting from a trio of concurring tragedies — social unrest, the pandemic and the economic crisis, we’ve all had a lot to process.

Sadly, the tragic deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many others, as well as the justified anger and fury and ensuing protests, speak to the racism that has plagued this country in the same way it has perpetually defined the everyday realities of individuals who face intolerance, discrimination and marginalization.

Our work at Five Keys is based on our commitment to the concept that every individual is entitled to participate in and have access to the benefits of our society. We focus on education, and the larger protections of social justice.

As the nation pivots from mourning to celebrating the life of George Floyd, our community of Five Keys staff must take a critical look inward to make sure we, as an agency for social justice change, are reflective in our actions and personnel of the societal change we want to see.

In the face of this adversity, we’ve amped up our efforts to be on the front lines of this pain. During this chaos, Five Keys is committed to staying on course and continues to stay connected to and serve society’s most vulnerable. All of these heartbreaking circumstances are a reminder that we are not in complete control. But it must remind us how important what we do is, and to continue taking action.

In the words of Clarece Weinraub, Ed.D., Area Superintendent SoCal, “There has been a lot of conversation on the national stage about equity, bias, and systematic racism and it’s a perfect time to learn more about how education plays into the system and hopefully challenge ourselves to be the change. I would encourage everyone to spend this time thinking about how your daily interactions are influenced by your background and exploring what biases you might have, naming them and making a plan with yourself on how you are going to address them. No matter what work you have done to make sure you are not part of the problem, you have to continue working and checking yourself and the work is never done. I think that is true for all of us, no matter our race or background.” 

Our collective vulnerability is asking us, “What is truly important?”

With Five Keys committed to getting people’s lives back on track – behind the walls of 23 county jails, in neighborhood social justice mission centers in economically isolated communities, navigation centers for the unsheltered homeless, and more than 100 sites, we are dedicated to staying the course of our mission. Since 2003, we have been blazing a trail of transformation for more than 20,000 Californians without a day of interruption — and we are not about to stop in the face of a pandemic, or anything else.

In the midst of this uncertainty, we have good news and some major challenges. Our work with the homeless is growing rapidly. With the opening of our sixth Navigation Center on June 8, we will be hiring another 50 people working at the Bayshore and Embarcadero SAFE centers, three hotels, and the Moscone Center. Five Keys now has 700+ employees. 

We are also faced with the challenges of budget cuts. The Legislature is considering a State Budget proposal that would prevent 1,000 students from earning a high school diploma. Please sign our petition and stand with us to keep students in County Jails from losing their diploma programs at www.fivekeys.org.

Despite the challenges, we are committed to staying the course and finding creative ways to provide opportunities that will change the trajectory of lives. 

If you are reading this, you are part of the Five Keys community. Whether a donor, or partner, student, staff member, teacher, navigation center worker, volunteer, or friend, please know that you matter – you are important to us. We are thinking about you. Stay safe, take care of yourself mentally, physically and spiritually. We are not just a face on a computer or a voice on the phone, we are people who care and are with you even when we are not. We will be back together again soon. Until then, we are united and preparing for a better, brighter future together.

Thank you for all you do,

Steve Good

Executive Director

P.S. With all the craziness in the world right now, Britt Creech, activities coordinator at Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center shared how guests and staff there have turned a garden into a getaway for the mind in chaotic times. Here we invite you to pause as we share the beautiful photos that show what gardeners know, that working with the soil is a way to connect with nature and help take away worries, at least temporarily.

First Responders for San Francisco’s Most Vulnerable: Homeless Shelter workers are the Unsung Heroes on the Front Lines of COVID-19

On Saturday of Easter weekend, one of the homeless guests at the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center went into labor and was transported to a San Francisco hospital to give birth to her new baby. The next day, a long-time couple stepped out in the courtyard between the two gray bunker dormitories at the waterfront center to say: “I do now.” They tied the knot to the cheers of a handful of (socially distanced) guests. In the two weeks that have followed, the staff at Bayshore Navigation center and at the city’s temporary hotel quarters for the homeless have raced to the rescue of two different guests who were overdosing outside on the street. Administering CPR and Narcan, they reversed the overdoses, giving both patients more time for paramedics to get them to the hospital. They saved their lives.

At a time when a terrorist called COVID-19 has stopped the world in its tracks, the staff at The Embarcadero and Bayshore Navigation centers and other SF CBO city partners, are answering the call to care for the community of unsheltered homeless. The silver lining: the glimpses of light that shine through in moments big and small — a new life in the birth of a baby, love in a time of coronavirus, and the saving of two lives.

“They are the unsung heroes of the pandemic,” said Steve Good, Executive Director of Five Keys Schools and Programs, which has been tapped by city leaders to became a homeless shelter first responders’ SWAT team to work alongside San Francisco’s public health supervisors and homeless advocates to dramatically reduce density in crowded shelters.

“Our navigation team and our fellow CBOs are not just staffing these emergency shelters, they are literally saving lives,” said Good.

Good called Five Keys navigation center employees and others manning the homeless shelters in San Francisco, “the unsung heroes of the pandemic.”

In the best of times, providing food, shelter, and safety to San Francisco’s homeless population is a challenge. But as the COVID-19 outbreak continues, efforts have become more extreme.

But through San Francisco’s safety efforts, more than 900 homeless people have been moved into hotel rooms and a pop-up shelter at Moscone West, as the city struggles to keep the pandemic from racing through its 8,000-strong unhoused population.

Specifically, Five Keys was named by San Francisco city leaders to supervise operations at Site 10, a 450-room hotel in the city’s center that is housing 360 guests that were formerly in shelters but are most vulnerable to COVID-19 because of age or preexisting medical conditions.

“Unlike many of us, our residents experiencing homelessness cannot simply close their doors to this disease, and that’s why San Francisco has ramped up efforts to de-escalate transmission of this disease within shelters, and ultimately save lives,” said Good. Five Keys runs the Embarcadero SAFE Navigation Center and the Bayshore Navigation Center. “Though no one is immune to COVID-19, this pandemic has all too clearly revealed the voids in our society and serves as a wake-up call on the life-and-death urgency of taking care of the most vulnerable in our population.”

Like nurses and doctors, the individuals on the front lines of San Francisco’s homeless centers and now the hotel shelters, are risking their lives, said Good. He says from the start, the can-do attitude among Five Keys employees has been: "Whatever it takes. Sign me up."

Since 2003, Five Keys has been committed to getting the lives of people on the margins of society back on track — behind the walls of 20 county jails, in economically isolated communities, at two navigation centers for the unsheltered homeless, and more than 100 sites throughout San Francisco and southern California.

Five Keys’ navigation center directors like Meg O’Neill, who has been deployed to head operations at Site 10 hotel and almost 200 other Five Key employees who directly serve the homeless are true COVID-19 first responders. At the hotel and the navigation centers, they supervise teams that not only feed, shelter and provide education for guests, but respond to fights, seizures, overdoses, and episodes tied to addiction and mental illness. They de-escalate each situation and stabilize people until medical personnel arrives when necessary.

They are literally saving lives.  Already twice the staff at the centers have raced to  rescue guests who are overdosing outside on the street. Administering CPR and Narcan, they reversed the overdoses, giving the patients more time for paramedics to get them to the hospital. They saved two lives.

In many ways, the Five Keys’ team’s nimbleness, and ability to race toward the chaos of COVID-19 is because of the staff’s firsthand experiences in confronting trauma and the resilience and grit they have gained in their personal lives, said Good.

“Many of our staff in our navigation centers have spent serious time in prison and bring a very unique calm and ability to get through during a time of crisis like this,” said Good. “At the same time, they are putting their own lives at great risk. But they do it, because they have a tremendous passion and determination to give back and serve.”

Five Keys Schools and Programs and Insight Prison Project Announce Partnership to Expand Trauma-Informed Programs for the Incarcerated

Five Keys Schools and Programs, which has spent nearly 18 years pioneering ways to change lives through trauma-informed education and programs in correctional facilities across California, has announced a partnership with the Insight Prison Project to leverage both organization’s experience to enhance ways to increase outcomes for returning citizens.

“Now more than ever we need to form partnerships to pool resources in this pandemic,” said Steve Good, executive director for Five Keys Schools and Programs based in San Francisco. “We are excited to merge with the Insight Prison Project to expand our reach and resources that help transform the lives of the incarcerated and prepare them for successful reentry. Both of our organizations have great experience providing education and programs that build trust, acknowledge personal accountability and each person’s dignity and empower individuals to take advantage of opportunities that can change the trajectory of their lives — and help them to engage differently with their worlds.”

Through the partnership, the Insight Prison Project will run under the umbrella of Five Keys Schools and Programs, which was founded by The San Francisco Sheriff's Department in 2003 as the first charter school for incarcerated adults in the country. Its pioneering programs serve more than 4,000 people a day and have awarded more than 2,800 high school diplomas or GED equivalents. It is touted for shutting the revolving door of inmates going in and out of jail.

Insight Prison Project, based in San Rafael, offers an innovative restorative justice program, the Victim Offender Education Group, which focuses on transformational re-education. It serves 300 incarcerated persons in California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington. It will continue to operate and grow its transformational programs for prisoners and parolees, which are supported by crime victims and community volunteers. 

“This is a perfect fit for both organizations who work to prepare people to come home and contribute to society by leading productive and restorative lives that cause no harm to others or themselves,” said Leonard Rubio, executive director of the Insight Prison Project.

About Five Keys Schools and Programs

Dedicated to getting people’s lives back on track, Five Keys Schools and Programs and its more than 550 dedicated employees serve more than 25,000 individuals each year throughout the San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles and nine counties through the state of California. Five Keys was founded in 2003 by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department as the first accredited charter high school in the nation to provide diploma programs for adults in county jails. Today its efforts have grown exponentially. The organization interrupts the cycles of homelessness, substance abuse, violence, literacy and incarceration through our 80 community learning centers, transitional housing shelters, career centers, and community-based workforce networks by investing in their humanity so that they can be self-determined to change their lives. Five Keys also hires people directly into our transitional employment positions for formerly incarcerated individuals and people currently or formerly experiencing homelessness. Five Keys has been the recipient of many awards including Harvard University’s Innovations in Government Award, and California Charter School of the Year.

About Insight Prison Project

Since 1997, the Insight Prison Project has been dedicated to reducing recidivism rates and improving public safety by conducting highly effective in-prison rehabilitation programs that provide returning citizens with the tools and life skills necessary to create durable change through trauma-informed transformational programs. www.InsightPrisonProject.org.