Brian Hill: Edovo, Hope & Increased Choices

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#79: This week we spoke with Brian Hill, the founder and CEO of Edovo, an organization that provides robust educational, vocational, and rehabilitative curriculums and content to incarcerated people. While growing up, Brian’s father taught classes at a prison in California and would come home and read the essays written by his pupils as bedtime stories to his kids. Brian recounts how he could feel the hope emanating out of each of those essays. Now, Brian has dedicated his life to bringing folks daily access to education and programming, so anyone who wants to take a shot at turning their life around has the tools and resources to do so. Tune into the episode to learn more about Brian and Edovo, including:

• Why criminal justice is a story of recovery, and we must offer folks more grace and recognize the complexities.
• Recovery is all about increasing our choices, however prisons stifle the opportunity for individuals to practice making good choices. Edovo gives folks the path to gradually show up and make decisions on a daily basis.
• How just like at The Phoenix, it’s imperative to look at folks as the solution, rather than the problem.
• Our current prison system is not a winning strategy, and fundamentally we need to decide as a country what we are trying to accomplish by imprisoning people.
• Giving people back their humanness, and how small steps and actions can inject a whole lot of hope into folks.
• How the vision of Edovo has always been to create a scalable mechanism for other organizations who are doing this type of work to get involved, like The Phoenix.

To learn more about Edovo visit https://www.edovo.com/

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If you or a loved one is experiencing a mental health or substance use related crisis, the following resources can provide immediate help.*

If you are experiencing a medical/mental health emergency, dial 911.

• Dial 988 for the SAMSHA Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.  Available 24/7
• Text “HOME” to 741-741 for the NAMI Crisis Text Line.  Available 24/7
• Dial 1-800-622-2255 to connect with a nearby treatment center & community resources through NCADD Hope Line. Available 24/7
• Call/text 1-844-326-5400 for The GSCA CARES Warm Line.  Answered by Certified Addiction Recovery Empowerment Specialists with lived experience of SUD.  Available any day of the year, 8:30am-11pm EST

*Note: The resources listed are provided for informational purposes only.  This list is not comprehensive and does not constitute an endorsement by The Phoenix or the Rise Recover Live Podcast.

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