Feminist Group From All-Male Prison Featured in Recent CNN Film Thrives with Contributions from Committed Womyn
Success Stories, recently exhibited in the CNN documentary The Feminist on Cell Block Y, is a program where young incarcerated men transform their lives by challenging their patriarchy. The film beautifully reveals the struggles of the participants and leaders as we wrestle with our toxic masculinity in prison to build freer more integrated lives. However, the Success Stories team doesn’t only include these men. It also includes visionary womyn whose support make the program possible and have done so since the beginning.
Chantal Coudoux
Prison programs like Success Stories do not survive without support from the outside. They require surgically precise navigation through prison bureaucracy and communication with imprisoned leadership through slender, approved channels. Chantal has been volunteering her time connecting the group with outside resources since 2014 as its Community Liaison. She links graduates with education and employment resources once they parole. She coordinates between the incarcerated directors and the prison administration to bring in outside speakers. She works with Success Stories’ fiscal sponsor, LA-based Dignity and Power Now (DPN), to supply the group with learning aids such as The Mask You Live In, a documentary about toxic masculinity that Success Stories uses in its curriculum.
Taina Vargas-Edmond
Success Stories feminist authenticity is largely built upon Taina’s investment of her time and her story. Her relationships, conversations, and visits with multiple Success Stories directors and facilitators keep the group plugged into womyn’s experiences with patriarchy. As shown in the documentary, it is her generous sharing that enlightens the group to contemporary feminist conversations like those around street harassment and rape culture.
Janice Bonello
Janice led Success Stories’ patriarchy workshops with her friend Chris Siders for three straight seasons in 2015 and 2016. She and Chris were leaders of a feminist club at California State University Monterey Bay when Taina connected them with Success Stories. Janice’s interactive workshops drew participants’ toxic beliefs into the open. She then contested those beliefs by speaking out her personal experience as a survivor of multiple forms of patriarchal violence. Her openness and candor still echo in the group’s antipatriarchy work today.
Patrisse Cullors
The #BlackLivesMatter cofounder and DPN founder was an original supporter of Success Stories, bringing it on as an official project of DPN early in the lives of both organizations. This relationship supplied Success Stories with the budget required to bring in outside presenters and resources. It also brought forth Chantal as a volunteer and offered Success Stories legitimacy in the eyes of the prison which helped it become a state recognized program. DPN has since hired one of the incarcerated men who made Success Stories possible, James Nelson, when he paroled in 2014 after serving 29 years. He continues to work with them as a full time Community Organizer.
bell hooks
The patriarchy workshop Success Stories delivers is largely inspired by the writings of feminist social critic and author bell hooks. Her books The Will to Change, We Real Cool, and All About Love are each quoted throughout the curriculum and in The Feminist on Cell Block Y. Success Stories sees itself as a mediator, relaying her insights to incarcerated men in the common language of California male prisons.