Letter from the Executive Director | September 2026

Fall always brings school back into focus. Backpacks, bus schedules, first-day photos filling up everyone’s feed. It is also a good time to think about the kids who are already being pushed toward a different path.

Minnesota is regularly ranked one of the best states in the country to live in. It is also home to some of the starkest racial disparities in the nation, in income, in housing, in incarceration, and in how our schools discipline students. Researchers call this the Minnesota Paradox. Nowhere is it more visible than in the school-to-prison pipeline, where Black and Brown students are suspended, expelled, and referred to law enforcement at far higher rates than their peers, often for the same behavior.

I know what that looks like from the inside of it. Long before I ever saw a courtroom, I sat in a hallway outside a principal’s office and learned that the system had already decided who and what I was. Nobody asked what was happening at home. Nobody asked why I was struggling. I was a thing to them. I was a discipline problem with a file, and the file followed me. Every kid who gets escorted out of a classroom this fall instead of into a counselor’s office is learning the same lesson I did.

The pipeline does not stop when a young person leaves school, and it does not stop when a sentence ends. This is where MFF’s work picks up. Coming home after incarceration is about more than getting through a sentence. It is about whether someone can actually build a life when they get home.

This summer I sat with a man who came home after more than twenty years inside. He found a job. He showed up, did the work, and was building something. Weeks later the background check came back, and the job was gone. He had done everything we tell people to do, and a record older than some of his coworkers still had the final say.

That is a problem we can solve. An employer who has already agreed to hire the person, not the record. A place to live that does not disappear the day a paycheck does. A community that doesn’t look to continue punishment after a sentence is served. That is what we are building, and it is why we are building it.

There has been progress. More employers are willing to have the conversation. But the record itself still does most of the talking. Until that shifts, the road home will keep costing people jobs they have already earned.

That is why this November matters. Minnesota will choose a governor, an attorney general, and the legislators who write our sentencing laws and decide who gets a second chance. Between now and then, our team will be canvassing, educating voters, and knocking on doors alongside partners like T.O.N.E. U.P. This work is not something we talk about. It’ is something our community shows up and does together.

We cannot fix a problem as deep as the Minnesota Paradox with one program or one policy. We fix it by refusing to look away from where it starts and by building something on the other side worth reaching. Destroy the pipeline in. Build the road home. That is the work MFF has committed to, and I am grateful you are part of it.

In freedom,

Elizer Darris