Since 2020, my work at RESHAPE has been linked to the employability of the people we accompany. It's not hard to understand the importance of work in a person's life – it's how we earn money that allows us to have a house, food and support our family, but it's also what we give 40 hours a week to. Therefore, work will always be a central theme at RESHAPE: unemployment and poverty are major risk factors when it comes to criminal recidivism.
The first job after incarceration is always the most difficult and the most important, due to the urgency of finding a way to obtain essential goods that can be reconciled with all the difficulties resulting from imprisonment: physical and/or mental health problems, debts, problems with documentation, looking for housing and rebuilding a social life. It is also this first job that will make it possible to find something better to follow and begin to believe in the possibility of getting out of precariousness, by increasing qualifications throughout this new journey in the job market.
Thus, Reshape Ceramics was born with a simple mission: to give people in the prison community an opportunity to learn and work. As we like to say: we don't hire people to make ceramics, we make ceramics to hire people. By providing training and a living wage to our artisans while they are still incarcerated and providing transitional employment after their release, as well as individual mentoring, we have tried to eliminate some of the biggest difficulties associated with this period.
With Reshape Ceramics we want to showcase the talent and potential that exists in our prison community and anyone who already owns one of our pieces can attest to that. And how do we do it? Betting and investing in each of our artisans, giving them all the conditions they need, training them to be better at what they do and listening to their feedback.
And when one of our artisans is ready to leave the project, giving his place to another who needs it more, we make sure that his next work has, at least, the same conditions as he had with us, and that alone is difficult. From non-contract “job” offers to unnecessarily demanding requirements for minimum-wage jobs with rotating days off and schedules, it seems that job openings that allow for a way out of precariousness are increasingly scarce.
There is no lack of people who want and need to work, there is a lack of decent and inclusive opportunities. Thus, we challenge companies to invest and bet on people. Work is a fundamental part of everyone's life and workers are essential for any company. So when we are talking about improving jobs, we cannot forget about the most vulnerable ones.
REFERENCES
[1] “Quiet quitting”: When the worker keeps his job, but will only go as far as he needs, refusing the idea of going “beyond” his work. Source: https://sicnoticias.pt/mundo/2022-08-31-O-que-e-o-quiet-quitting–Conheca-a-nova-tendencia-para-trabalhar-menos-e3dc9df4
[2] “Great Resignation”: A term coined in May 2021, it describes the record number of people leaving their jobs since the beginning of the pandemic. After a long period of working from home without commuting, many people have decided that work-life balance is more important to them. This labor market revolution appears to continue apace, with one in five workers worldwide planning to quit in 2022. Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/the- great-resignation-is-not-over/
This is one of our slogans that we are keeping in our minds for whatever we do, as it is our mission to offer support to those who need it. With the dream of a world where no one gets left behind, it is important to always take care of each other. And just like those people who need our support to move towards the right direction, neither could we walk towards our big dream of a better future, if it weren’t for other companies and projects that share our vision of the world. Because together we have a bigger impact on society.
That is, why we have our so called “Friends - Collection”, where we sell products from organisations who have their own significant way of creating and supporting others.
So, let us take a closer look at each of the projects:
Our first part of our Friends Collection. Inclusus Wine is the result of a project, that aims to enhance social reinsertion tools in the fields of viticulture and wine production.
AdegaMãe and EPL – Leira Prison Establishment (Youth) established a partnership to improve professional skills for young inmates. The Project, which started in 2018, relies on the commitment of those people from viticulture and wine harvest, right through the final work phase in the cellar.
“This is a project of great symbolic value for us (…). This brand of wine, Inclusus, is a way of alerting people to issues related with good practices of social rehabilitation and the future of these young people” says Bernardo Alves, the CEO of AdegaMãe.
The Red Wine offers a taste experience of an intense nose with fresh fruit and wild berries. The White Wine combines a citrus Aroma with a minor tropical note, which makes both wines a brilliant companion for dinner or a Wine Evening with (what else) friends!
The Ervas da Vila Project started in November 2017 as a social entrepreneurship project with the focus to promote the integration of citizens with disabilities or incapacity into the labour market. The goal is to develop the expertise that enhances the autonomy and integration through the acquisition of skills and techniques in both personal and professional aspects.
The execution works by cultivating and reproducing spices, teas, and medical plants. The project’s beneficiaries are responsible for conducting activities from assembling the irrigation system, to farming and preparing the plants until they are ready to be placed in the market.
The Ervas da Vila project Is already a benchmark both in improving the social problem of unemployment of people with disabilities, as well as in the quality of the products in terms of a sustainable market.
As a perfect addition for a quiet Moment or some spice-up in your next dinner, we sell four different kinds of herbs as well as four different tea-flavours from their all-organic products.
With one part of their manifests being: “Believe in the Power of Community. Give an Opportunity and Be a Drop in the Ocean – all together we make the Ocean alive.” Amal Soap is a project that sets similar values as we do.
Amal produces handcrafted soap made by women from Syria, who are living in Portugal, intending to build a bridge between these two cultures. Their Aim is to support refugees that are struggling in finding a job and help them to integrate.
Just like what their Name stands for (Hope in Arabic), Amal wants to empower those women and give them a fresh start and make them financially independent, socially integrated and above all hopeful for the future.
What started then as a student project to help minimize a societal problem, is now an establishment that creates an impact in other peoples’ lives.Amal brings together two cultures and combines both quality and impact.
The completely natural, gently crafted Soaps are made for different skin types due to its gentle formula and anti-inflammatory properties. In our Collection you can find five different kinds of Soaps with each having a different effect on your body and mind.
Being Pioneers in their field, EcoX is the first Company in the world, which transforms waste into 100% ecological detergents to create environmentally friendly cleaning products.
The Portuguese Company aims to be an inspiration for global initiatives in the areas of ecology, recycling, and valorisation of resources, so in Addition to their innovative, stand-alone concept, all their products are vegan and biodegradable.
With their packaging and communication, EcoX has also received the Green Good Design Award. An Award that promotes exceptional companies and products who take steps towards a healthier and more sustainable universe.
We are thrilled to cooperate with all those organization and believe that supporting each other and these projects will increase our impact we as a team as well as individuals can have on the world.
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RESHAPE is a Private Institution of Social Solidarity, which works with people who are or have been imprisoned and their families. The Portuguese prison system currently has about 11,000 people in prison and it is estimated internationally that 7 out of 10 people commit crimes again after being released, the so-called criminal recidivism (this data is unfortunately not published in Portugal). Imagine what it would be like for 7 out of 10 children who go to school not to learn to read and write, or 7 out of 10 people who go to a hospital not to see their problems being solved. I think that as a society we would demand better results. That's what we at RESHAPE do. We work to improve the system and to create tools for social reintegration that don’t exist in our country. Another very important factor to consider, is that it is known that there is a strong and direct correlation between the unemployment rate of people who have been in prison and the recidivism rate. People that leave prison are 50% less likely to reoffend if they have a job on release.
Thus, employability has been a major focus of RESHAPE and it was in this context that we began to think about what kind of social business we could launch that would work on several objectives in parallel and improve the social reintegration of people who are or have been imprisoned.
First, we wanted to create a social business that was b2c, that dealt directly with the end customer.That is because for us it was very important that society in general began to become more and more aware of this issue and get to know the challenges that the social reintegration of those who are in prison has.
Social reintegration can never be the ultimate responsibility of any government, it must be the responsibility of all of us, of the local communities. Therefore, a utilitarian or decorative ceramic product would be a good way to bring the “prison system” into people's homes. Each piece carries a life story. Each piece to be used in the Portuguese homes is a piece that not only tells this story but also sparks conversations about the prison system. There is nothing better than a ceramic piece, a traditional Portuguese piece, to carry stories and concrete challenges. We want to make each of the Portuguese families an ambassador family for the cause and sensitize to this social problem as well.
Second, we wanted it to be a business. In other words, we wanted to demonstrate to other companies (not only in the ceramics sector) that it was possible to do business with the enormous talent that is being wasted in our prisons. In addition, there are immense infrastructures and potential that can and should be explored in a prison environment. Thus, we would be using two resources that are usually wasted - human resources (which are stuck, but full of talent) and infrastructure resources that are empty and useless at present. It was in this sense that, for example, we found in Caxias Prison an old deactivated pottery that with a minimal investment became operational again. This objective is more ambitious, but what we want is for all companies in Portugal to stop looking at the criminal record and start looking at the person, their potential, and their talents. One of the great mottos of RESHAPE is that every man is greater than his mistake. And who among us has never made mistakes? Should we be judged and persecuted all our lives for a mistake made in the past? When we were only 20 or 30 years old? We truly believe that all industries lacking skilled labor should look at this opportunity that lies in all of our hands.
Last but not least, we wanted it to be a productive process, that the result was not immediate and that in the end we had a physical product. Ceramics have a lot of time-consuming and complex processes, and in the end, due to a series of external factors, many things can go wrong.
This type of trial-and-error processes, of repetition until perfection, even though we have (in theory) done everything well, are the most pedagogical there are, and bring immense analogies to our lives. How many times have we not done everything well in our life and yet it seems that everything goes wrong, or that we are unlucky? Learning to integrate the defeats and difficult moments that we all go through is essential for a successful social reintegration and back into society. Hence, ceramics through the transformation of the raw material, which takes time and even then, may not turn out well, brings us very powerful messages of life for those who work with clay. Ceramics have the power to transform lives and make our communities and neighborhoods safer.
However, it is not enough to put people who are or were imprisoned producing utilitarian and decorative ceramic pieces for us to be able to guarantee a successful reinsertion. That's why we developed our own methodology, which we called the reshape methodology, which is a holistic process that works with the various dimensions of each beneficiary's life. First, we always start with social skills development training (RESHAPE Academy program). We all need to work on emotional management skills, communication, mutual help, and team spirit (not just those who are in prison). Then follows a phase of transitional employment (which begins inside the prison and continues outside) in the reshape ceramics production units. We have two production sites (inside and outside prison) to allow this ceramics job to also be a smoother transition to freedom. And finally, through the NGO’s socio-labor integration office, we work with dozens of companies available to integrate these people, as they know they are committed, hardworking and willing to seize an opportunity.
We still don't know what social impact Reshape Ceramics will have in the medium/long term, but we do know that the message it is passing and the process it is creating is having a huge echo in our society. We believe in the power of business to create social value and we believe that the ceramics industry can play its role here, and that’s why we have launched Reshape Ceramics.
CEO Reshape
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