Vivian

Reverend Vivian D. Nixon is an advocate for education and justice reform who describes herself as a “joyfully Black woman whose release from correctional oversight gave rise to a search for true liberation and guided her academic and career choices.”

Currently Nixon is a Writer in Residence at Columbia University’s Square One Project, an organization that’s focused on imagining a future for justice and public safety that starts from square one instead of chipping away at the edges of reform.    

Previously, Vivian served for 20 years as the Executive Director of College & Community Fellowship, an NYC nonprofit dedicated to helping women with criminal convictions earn college degrees—a program from which Nixon herself is a graduate.

In this episode—recorded on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2022—Nixon describes her personal experience serving time in prison, her inspiring professional rise after release, and her take as a national policy expert on how to get citizens from jail to jobs.

Stay tuned at the end of the conversation for our “Deep Dive” segment where we zoom in on one point our guest made, take a deeper dive into how it all relates to the broader Jail to Jobs policy context. In this episode, we explore technical parole violations. Believe it or not, nearly half of state prison admissions nationwide occur because of technical, nonviolent parole violations. We’ll learn about this, and much more, in our conversation with Rev. Nixon.