Entrepreneurs Beyond Systems: From Vision to Action charts the path of a Detroit-based coalition dreaming about equitable entrepreneurship for individuals impacted by mass incarceration and the criminal legal system. In 2025, this coalition convened men and women, Detroiters representing from the eastside, westside, and Southwest, and people deeply committed to the potential of social entrepreneurship to ground in collective values and reimagine what’s possible for us all. In our group, many of us have family members who are currently incarcerated and nearly 40% have navigated incarceration before–ranging from sentences less than 2 years to 15 years or more. Each person is grounded in the value of creating innovative, sustainable solutions to the deepest problems facing our communities today, prioritizing social impact alongside financial viability in our business models, breaking the cycles that lead to trauma, injustice, and harm and addressing them at their roots.
Woven throughout the collaboration is the importance of a growth mindset, one that believes in centering lived experience and expertise to generate solutions that look ahead to a resourceful future for our communities. Alongside this, we are anchored in key principles around how we approach the work: we have deeply considered the pathways we want to see aspiring entrepreneurs move toward. In visioning, we grounded in core principles, including cooperative economics, healing and well-being, and creating jobs that have positive social impact on the communities they are located in. We know that our people have consistently built skills–but the systems surrounding mass incarceration are often designed to lock folks up and out, instead of creating opportunities to transfer skills to meaningful opportunities to resource ourselves, our families, and our communities.
This report serves as a resource and guide for all interested in transformative change. It includes compelling information around unique challenges and barriers, provides robust ideas for interventions that would be possible with more resources, and lands on two tangible pilot program ideas to begin testing in Wayne County in 2025.
In particular: what would it look like to focus on the entrepreneur and not on their business?
We have a deep appreciation to our coalition partners, their staff, and the generous support from the Michigan Justice Fund who all made this work possible:
