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.
“Few people understand how to navigate the trauma and chaos prevalent on our streets better than those who’ve endured it themselves,” Urban Alchemy co-founder and CEO Lena Miller said in a telephone interview.
Urban Alchemy has a workforce of 1,300 employees. Ninety-six percent of employees are formerly incarcerated. Seventy percent of the formerly incarcerated are LTOs, according to the nonprofit. Miller said she prefers LTOs because they have a lot more respect for their freedom.
“Through extensive training, competitive compensation, and ongoing support, we ensure their success and offer pathways to a long-term career,” said Miller. “We also provide practitioners the opportunity to give back to their community, which is profoundly important to their reentry.”
The role of these LTO practitioners, according to Miller, is to help remove tents from the street so people can easily use the sidewalks, and clean up drug paraphernalia left behind by frequent drug use. Practitioners also help reverse drug overdoses and to de-escalate problems associated with drugs or mental illness.
What Miller is doing appears to be working. The organization is credited with resolving over 1,000 non-emergency calls related to homeless people and behavioral health. They saved the lives of over 900 through overdose reversals and other interventions.
Having an impact on crime
This year, there is even more for Miller to be excited about. Forrest Stuart, a professor of sociology at Stanford University, said a 52 percent decline in crime happened in 2023 compared to 2022 where Urban Alchemy practitioners are posted throughout the city. A study analyzing crime stats from San Francisco police, looking at 40 intersections, showed the drop.
The study was spearheaded by Stuart and conducted by Stanford’s Ethnography Lab. It’s an independent study that still needs to be further researched and peer-reviewed.
“We will be submitting it this year for peer review,” said Stuart. “There’s a second component of the study that I have been spearheading, which is to actually figure out the mechanism, which is to figure out how this is happening.”
“The people who don’t have any skin in the game are throwing all the rocks. They have been attacking us. But police and city officials are very supportive.” Lena Miller, Urban Alchemy co-founder and CEO
The early results of the study are being celebrated by Miller. She has faced accusations that her workers are nothing more than drug dealers who carry weapons and take advantage of the unhoused. Critics, such as homeless advocacy groups and former employees, complain that Urban Alchemy workers have no licenses to work as security guards and that the city shouldn’t be outsourcing government functions to nonprofits.
“The people who don’t have any skin in the game are throwing all the rocks,” said Miller. “They have been attacking us. But police and city officials are very supportive.”
“Police unions don’t want to deal with this stuff,” she said. “They see us and know we’re legitimate. The progressives have the biggest issue with us.”
According to Miller, there is a waiting list of about 5,000 people looking for a job at Urban Alchemy. However, she still makes it a priority to hire the formerly incarcerated and the unhoused.
Miller is a lifelong resident of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. She remembers being the only white girl who attended Martin Luther King Jr. preschool in the 1970s. She said she was bullied and tested daily by Black community members, but eventually gained respect in a predominantly poor and crack cocaine-plagued housing project.
Rising above, giving back
Miller prides herself in rising above her circumstances to give back to her community, She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She holds a master’s degree in social work from San Francisco State University. She also holds a master’s degree in psychology, and a doctorate in psychology from the University of San Francisco. Today, she is using her education to be part of the solution to community problems.
Miller also has a long list of accomplishments. She has been an adjunct professor for the University of San Francisco’s Masters in Behavioral Health program. She has provided crisis intervention training for SFPD in the area of complex trauma and emotional intelligence and has trained over 600 officers over the last three years. She has also provided this training for over 200 former LTOs and over 200 public housing residents.
Urban Alchemy currently contracts in California with the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, as well as BART, UC Law San Francisco and the organization Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
Miller said she is looking to hire more formerly incarcerated people coming out of the system to help expand the organization. She is able to employ most returning citizens, with the exception of those with sex offense convictions.
Miller said she hopes that one day everyone incarcerated gets a chance to return back to their communities, especially those facing the most extreme sentences.
“Give people in administrative segregation and on Death Row a shout out for me,” she said. “We’re waiting for all of them to come home as well.”