Urban Alchemy helps SF clean up the streets, puts formerly incarcerated on path to careers

A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION based in San Francisco is proving that one way to achieve public safety is by hiring formerly incarcerated people.

Urban Alchemy, founded in 2018, prioritizes hiring former long-term offenders (LTOs) — people with life sentences who spent decades in prison — as practitioners and ambassadors to help keep streets clean and safe in areas struggling with extreme poverty, addiction, mental illness and hopelessness.