Kevi-Dems's Straighter Path Foundation
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K.D.S.P envisions a community where formerly incarcerated individuals with mental disorders and HIV are committed to their personal transformation and a crime free life. To grow as an individual, evolve during their re-entry path, re-connect with their families and friends, encourage others to stay on the straighten path, and above else gain there self-worth back.
TAKE A HUGE BITE OUT OF THE BIG APPLE
New York City, USA
MISSION STATEMENT
The mission of K.D.S.P. is to structure a straighter path for formerly incarcerated individuals who have or experience mental health challenges, HIV, homelessness, and substance abuse disorders. K.D.S.P. is for all formerly incarcerated individuals to have the ability and tools to maintain a productive, positive, and functional way of life that first and foremost embraces mental wellness and physical well-being along with work to reduce recidivism. K.D.S.P. strongly believes that with re-entry empowerment, counseling, life skills, and additional resources are the much needed tools to assist and improve the lives of people returning from state and federal prisons and local jails to society.
Our Vision
K.D.S.P embraces reentry empowerment, but K.D.S.P vision goes far beyond the Bay area. Statistics have shown mental illness is becoming an increasing problem within the prison and jail systems. In state prisons 73% of women and 55% of men have at least one mental health problem. In federal prisons, 61% women and 44% men, and in local jails 73% women and 63% men. Jails and prisons are becoming the places where individuals with severe mental disorders are housed. There are three times more incarcerated people with serious psychosis in the United States than in hospitals, and these types of behavioral and mental health problems among inmates is increasing.
K.D.S.P believes that by providing reentry empowerment through effective rehabilitation and skill development to those formerly incarcerated , that these will be effective tools that will aid clients in becoming functional members of society in the hopes that it will also reduce recidivism. Lasting solutions start from the ground up, with K.D.S.P, the participation and leadership of formerly incarcerated people, their families, and their communities.
K.D.S.P envisions a community where formerly incarcerated individuals with mental disorders and HIV are committed to their personal transformation and a crime free life. To grow as an individual, evolve during their re-entry path, re-connect with their families and friends, encourage others to stay on the straighten path, and above else gain there self-worth back.
Kevin-Dem’s Straighter Path Foundation (K.D.S.P) implores one to encompass and embrace this heartfelt vision and entrust us with donations to help us on our way. We are more than capable and forever indebted to begin this journey in hopes to elevate our mission; Our mission to a gateway to a straighter path.
Founding Mother
Kevi-Dem's Straighter Path Foundation is the brain child of our, Founder and Executive Director Ms. Cheryl Diston or Founding Mother as she is known to our Board. Ms. Diston's story is one of trials and tribulations, heartache, family, loss and finally redemption. You can hear more of Ms. Diston's journey here.
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Founder
Executive Director
Cheryl Diston
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Our Founder and Executive Director, Cheryl Diston, began her journey to beginning Kevi-Dem's Straighter Path Foundation with the loss of her two sons. One to a violent death and one to the California penal system. Not wanting to let the tragedy that befell her family mean nothing, she decided to try and make her situation make sense. She immediately enrolled back in college where she graduated from Berkeley College with specialties in Criminal Justice and Human and Public Services. After Berkeley College she began to work with other nonprofit agencies such as Essie which is an organization for families of incarcerated persons and POCC where she joined their Steering Committee for Alameda Adult Behavioral Mental Health. Executive Director Diston has also become an activist and made several trips to the state capitol to advocate for as well as protest against several Senate Bills concerning, California Corrections and Mental Health laws. Finally in April of 2017 Ms. Diston was ready to launch a program of her own. Kevi-Dem's Straighter Path Foundation, named for her two sons, is a program that targets a portion of our community that consistently falls through the cracks and that is marginalized by the laws of the land and the people who inhabit that land.