Benevolence Farm is 13 acres of farmland in North Carolina’s Alamance County. It is used for many things, including an active body care business that collects herbs for natural soaps and soy wax candles, a place where women who have been in prison can get help with problems that affect them across the state, and a home and safe place for some of those women.
Because Benevolence Farm is both a small business and a recovery community, it gives women who have been in prison a place to live and work on the farm. The women live in one of two shared homes for six months to two years. Benevolence Farm also wants to build tiny homes so that women who want to live alone but still want the support of their peers can do so.
Residents get support services that help them get back into society after being in jail, and they also work on the 13-acre farm, doing general farm chores like planting, harvesting, and drying herbs and flowers, as well as making body care products, packing online orders, and even coming up with new products.
The farm business helps women make enough money to live on, learn skills that will help them get a job, and get a pre-apprenticeship certificate from the Department of Labor that proves they are ready for work in the green economy.
Every year, more than 2,500 women come home from North Carolina state jails. Benevolence Farm fills a vital need by offering services that specifically meet the needs of these women, many of whom are also the main caregivers for their families.
Benevolence Farm is different from many other reentry programs because it doesn’t turn women away based on their past convictions. This means that even women with Class A felonies or records of drug abuse can apply.
But because of its size and its promise to “scale up at the speed of trust,” as Executive Director Kristen Powers put it, the farm can’t meet the needs of all the women across the state who are going back home. So, for some, the farm is a dream come true, and for others, it should be a model to follow.
Powers talked to Prism on the phone about Benevolence Farm’s “individualized system,” the housing problem for women in prison, and how important it is to look at things through a trauma-informed lens.
Along with other works by Ray Levy Uyeda and Tamar Sarai, this Q&A is part of a set called Prison in 12 Landscapes. The series runs until September and is set up so that people can learn about topics that are closest to prisons first, then move on to those that are farther away. You can read all of the books in the series here.
This talk has been cut down to make it shorter and clearer.
Tamar Sarai: I’d love to start by learning a little bit about your background and what brought you to this work.
Kristen Powers: People in my family watched out for my mom because she had a mental illness. Her neighbors would often call the cops or child services to deal with her.
As a child, I remember being upset that people, instead of working together to fix problems, turned to the police when things went wrong or made them feel unsafe. Unfortunately, my mom died of Huntington’s Disease, which weakened both her mental and physical health.
So, when I was in college and Mike Brown was killed by cops in 2014, I thought about all of that. That’s when I thought, “I’m a white woman whose dad and uncle were both police officers, and I feel this tension between what I’m seeing and what I’ve been told and what my mom went through.”
That made me think about what I wanted to do with my life. After graduating, I moved back to the South and started working for the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. There, I met some great organizers who had been in prison and taught me what I should be doing as a white ally.
At that time, I also learned about a place called Benevolence Farm. It interested me because I had just moved to a farm and it had completely changed my life. I was also interested in how women and prisons are connected.
Sarai: I always love hearing how people arrive at their work. Can you share a little bit about Benevolence Farm, its origin story, and what it offers to the women working and living on the farm?
Powers: Our founder, Tanya Jisa, was a social worker who worked with a lot of people who were touched by incarceration in 2007. Since then, we’ve grown and changed.
She was shocked that the number of women in prison was going up while little was being done to help them get back home or provide tools that took gender and trauma into account.
Women kept telling her, “When I get home, I need to find a place to live and a job.” They say that will keep me safe and in the community, but when I get out, I can’t find it.
Jisa started talking to women who had been in prison to get ideas for Benevolence Farm. Eventually, she saw an opportunity to use permaculture and agriculture to make a place that was the opposite of prison: nature, open skies, open lands, and no concrete bars. This would be a place where people could heal from their time in prison and get the help and services they needed.
When we first started, that meant giving people housing as soon as they got out of jail and a program where they could work and get paid at the same time to grow. That turned into a body care and social business in the end.
Now, I’d say it’s changed to the point where we still provide those core services, but we’re also investing in more structural changes to the criminal justice system by helping and training women who have been in prison to become advocates and push for system-level change.
Sarai: So are women who are living on the farm given the option to pivot towards advocacy rather than working on the farm?
Powers: The fact that it’s pretty personalized is very important to us. Some people don’t like how we only seem to help a few people at a time, but our goal is to grow as fast as trust would allow. When they first start out, new users don’t trust many systems, so our first goal is to build the group.
The farm is our main event, and everyone who comes is a part of it. People make money from the farm and the social enterprise. We then connect them with chances and people who share their interests. For example, yesterday our partners put out a call to action against a bad bill that would stop automatically expunging records of dismissed charges.
We also said that because of the power analysis we did, we want people from these communities across the state to contact their state legislators. It’s the same if there’s a job opening, training, a peer support group, or something similar. We focus on their goals as a person rather than what we think they should like once their basic wants are met.
Sarai: One thing I was curious about is how you address the second transition that women will go through from the farm to whatever permanent housing they find afterward. My understanding is their families aren’t living with them when they’re on the farm, but can they visit? How can they continue to foster relationships?
Powers: When people come in for an interview, one of the first two things they usually ask is, “Can I have a phone? Can I see my family?” The fact that people can’t talk to their families on TV makes me a little sad. They just got out of jail where they had to pay to talk to their families on the phone or tablets.
Now that they’re free, they go to programs that still limit their communication, even though there is proof that family ties keep people safe. For us, that means they get a cell phone on the first day.
We cover the first 30 days and then help them switch to a plan. We have pretty open times to visit family, and we plan activities for the whole family, like going to the movies or the park. After four weeks, they can go on long trips and spend the weekends with their family.
We started the Housing First Fund last year to help women who have been in prison across the state who want to come back to North Carolina and are looking for stable housing but can’t because of the high cost. We are also having a hard time finding affordable homes, just like most of the U.S.
If you have a criminal record, they will usually charge you more for applications that they will turn down and double your security deposit because they think you are a risk or don’t have good credit or money.
The Housing First Fund then pays the security fee so that people can move into the home they want. The fund is meant to show state and local governments that they should do these things even though they cost a lot of money.
Sarai: I noticed that the proposal for the tiny home community mentioned that the homes won’t have lofted beds because of how similar they may feel to prison bunk beds. Are there other design considerations—either in the existing residences or just throughout the farm itself—that were made in light of the fact that the residents are women who were incarcerated?
Powers: The two homes we’re in now just happened to come our way, and we’re grateful for that. However, we have learned that while peer-led housing can help some people, it loses its purpose when it starts to feel like prison or jail—for example, when there are a lot of people in one room or when people who have been through a lot of trauma don’t have their own space—which is exactly what happens in these situations.
Someone who had been in prison for 27 years started the tiny home community. She said that when she first moved into the shared living, that’s exactly what she needed: people she could just knock on their door and ask for help. She did say, though, that she had never lived alone or practiced living alone.
So, in 2020 and 2021, she started a talk to come up with ideas, which led to the design of these tiny homes. They will still be in nature, facing trees and water features, and residents won’t have to share. Instead, they can go to a neighbor’s house.
Donors have told us that building another shared house is more efficient. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean it’s more effective. Also, it doesn’t really put the needs of the people going through this process first. No one told us, “For the next two years, we want to live in another house with 10 other women.”
Maybe COVID made us more understanding of how important it is to have a break from time to time, even when you live with someone you love very much. That’s even more important for people who have had to be around other people for a long time.
Sarai: What’s an overarching takeaway you want readers to know or understand about Benevolence Farm?
Powers: I think what we really know at Benevolence Farm is that hurting other people is a part of being human, whether you do it or get hurt by it. At the moment, in the U.S., we don’t react to harm in a fair, compassionate, or trauma-informed way, and this is one reason why so many people are in jail.
I believe that at our core, we’re not only trying to help people after they get out of jail, but we’re also trying to figure out why people go to prison in the first place. We really think that Benevolence Farm is trying new things and coming up with new ideas. That sounds like something Mariame Kaba means when she says we need a million trials.
To make the world we want, people need to try new things every day. We try to do that at Benevolence Farm, but not always successfully. But I’m pretty excited about where we’re going and what we’ve found so far.