For our August Justice Champion Spotlight, we spoke with I Have A Bean’s Pete Leonard about making great coffee and creating real second chances.

Sam’s Club is the newest company joining Unlock Potential, a groundbreaking first-chance hiring program designed to create meaningful career opportunities.

For our June Spotlight we sat down with Dr. Marvin Carr, Director of the Walmart.org Center for Racial Equity. Click to read more about the most effective ways companies can fight for a fair and equal society, our incredible Unlock Potential partnership, and his storied opera career!

American Family Insurance and Delta Air Lines are the two newest businesses to join Unlock Potential.

On May 4-5, RBIJ were honoured to host the first ever American Workforce & Justice Summit in Atlanta GA!

For our May Spotlight, we sat down with some of our preeminent speakers to discuss the Summit - their impressions, key takeaways, and what they would most want to see from next year’s instalment!

Business leaders testified in the House Judiciary Committee in support of the Colorado Clean Slate Act (SB22-099), which will help provide access to employment, education, and housing for thousands of Coloradans.

For our Second Chance Month Spotlight, we sat down with a true Second Chance Champion - Drew Patterson, owner of Basic Industries. For years Drew and Basic have worked with the Colorado Department of Corrections to provide employment opportunities to formerly incarcerated individuals - and he knows firsthand the benefits to businesses, employees, and the communities they serve.

Joseph Kenner, President and CEO of Greyston (www.greyston.org), a leading bakery and pioneer of Open Hiring®, and David Levine, President of the American Sustainable Business Network (www.asbnetwork.org), on why Clean Slate New York is good for businesses.

For our March Spotlight we are honored to feature Jean Oelwang, President & CEO of Virgin Unite. Jean has helped corporations around the world put the wellbeing of people and the planet at their core, and has helped build several incredible initiatives, including The Elders, The B Team and The Carbon War Room. She has just published her first book, Partnering, in which she draws on her lifetime of experience to illuminate the core thread that weaves through sixty extraordinary partnerships and collaborations.

For RBIJ’s Black History Month Spotlight we sat down with our new Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Special Projects, Tiesa! Check our her interview, where we discuss college activism, the barriers facing Black women n America, running for office in Texas and reality TV.

To kick of 2022’s Spotlight series we’re profiling Kelly Services - a global workforce solutions provider that connects talented people to companies. They do this across 25 countries - placing around 370,000 people every year - and are committed to providing meaningful second chances for justice-impacted workers. We sat down with Keilon Ratliff, Professional and Industrial Global Vice President of Operations, to find out why.

For our final Spotlight of 2021 we profiled Checkr.org, the brand new philanthropic arm of leading technology company Checkr, and their Executive Director Ken Oliver. The organization was founded to fundamentally rethink how we provide second chances - through fair chance hiring, background checks and beyond. It is a mission that Ken, who himself spent almost 24 years behind bars, knows a great deal about.

Happy holidays from the whole team here at RBIJ! We hope you are keeping well and safe in these trying times. We wanted to take this opportunity to share our 2021 electronic card. It features the artwork and story of the incredible Ndume Olatushani, who spent 20 years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.

For November’s Spotlight, RBIJ sat down with Jeff Baldassari, CEO at U.S. Rubber Recycling - a triple-bottom-line businesses fundamentally committed to creating second chances in California. Having adopted second chance hiring over 20 years ago, formerly incarcerated people now make up half their workforce, and they remain deeply committed to both the business case and the social purpose of tapping into the justice-impacted talent pool.

For our October Spotlight we are profiling HiddenLight and their CEO Johnny Webb, who founded the production company with the Clinton family in 2019. They use filmmaking to tell some of the most important stories of our time and, in doing so, shed light on today's most urgent social issues. This includes the death penalty, and RBIJ were honoured to join forces with HiddenLight to promote the "It Could Happen To You" films - which looked at innocent people exonerated from death row.

For our September Spotlight we are profiling the journalist and broadcaster Raphael Rowe. After spending 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, Raphael was determined to shine a light on injustices around the world. Less than a year later he was working at the BBC, starting on Radio 4's Today Programme and has since then become one of the world's most prolific justice reporters - hosting the Netflix series World's Toughest Prisons, corresponding for Panorama, and presenting his own preeminent podcast Second Chances, to name just a few career highlights.

This month’s Justice Champion Spotlight falls on Tatiana Begault, Re-Entry Community Coordinator at Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Louisiana. Based in Louisiana, Tatiana utilizes her in-depth understanding of mind and behaviour to help justice-impacted individuals successfully reenter society in Louisiana - and works with businesses to do the same. We sat down to talk to her about the need for meaningful second chances, and the role that employers can play in creating a fairer and more equitable society.

For our July Spotlight we interviewed Joe DeLoss, the owner and Head Fryer at Hot Chicken Takeover. Joe founded HCT with a simple mission: to create extraordinary experiences for extraordinary people. That mission is about way more than food. Find out how and why they provide meaningful employment opportunities for people disadvantaged by adversity.

For June we are Spotlighting a Justice Champion that helps place justice at the heart of a corporation’s purpose: Porter Novelli. Born from the idea that communication can advance society, they help companies stand up and speak out about the most pressing issues we face today - including the inequality and unfairness that pervades our justice system - with Conroy Boxhill (Managing Director, North America) leading the charge.

This month’s Justice Champion Spotlight falls on Jeffrey Korzenik, the Chief Investment Strategist at one of the U.S's leading business banks, Fifth Third Bank. Jeff is a leading advocate for hiring individuals for criminal records and his recently released book 'Untapped Talent' focuses on the business case and best practices around doing so. We caught up with him to discuss the economic rationale behind fair hiring, and why businesses that don't adopt the talent strategy risk being left behind.