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By Genevieve Rimer, Vice President of Capacity Building and Technical Assistance
There’s a familiar instinct in our field: when we see a gap, we build something new to fill it.
But in reentry, that instinct can miss a harder truth. The issue isn’t always a lack of organizations. It’s that the organizations already doing the work are too often locked out of the very resources designed to support them.
Across the country, there are thousands of community-based organizations and employment social enterprises helping people stabilize, find work, and rebuild their lives. They are trusted because they’ve earned it through proximity and results. But too many operate below their potential, not because they lack strong programs, but because they lack access to the funding and systems that would allow them to grow.
That is the problem CEO’s Capacity Building and Technical Assistance work is built to solve, and it sits at the core of Opportunity 2030.
Opportunity 2030 is CEO’s vision for a national reentry infrastructure that can reach every person coming home from incarceration with real pathways to work and stability. That vision cannot be achieved by CEO alone. It depends on strengthening the broader ecosystem of providers across the country and ensuring they have the resources to scale.
This is what our capacity building work makes possible.
Through our partnership with REDF, CEO has supported cohorts of community-based organizations and employment social enterprises to become SNAP Employment and Training (SNAP E&T) third-party providers. That shift unlocks sustainable public funding. It allows organizations to expand programming, serve more people, and move from short-term grants to long-term scale.
You can see how this plays out in specific partnerships.
At Arouet, the foundation is already in place. As an approved SNAP E&T provider, they offer job search training that meets existing standards. What’s missing is a subsidized, work-based learning component, that would allow the organization to be reimbursed for wages earned by participants as they build practical skills on the job. CEO is partnering with Arouet to secure approval for this addition, enabling participants to receive stipends while gaining real-world experience. This is more than a programmatic tweak; it represents a meaningful shift toward a model that delivers both immediate income and lasting workforce development.
In California, CEO’s role in the HIRE initiative shows how capacity building and systems change come together. CEO helped secure the original state investment, and now serves as a hub for a network of community-based organizations. In this role, we provide technical assistance, act as an intermediary, and process stipends on behalf of partners. This model allows smaller organizations to participate in public funding systems that would otherwise be out of reach. It has already been replicated, which is exactly the kind of scalable infrastructure Opportunity 2030 is designed to build.
In Oklahoma, CEO serves as an intermediary for four reentry organizations, including partners connected to ProsperOK. These organizations have strong programming. CEO supports them in understanding what it means to operate a SNAP E&T program and helps manage the administrative processes , including monthly invoicing allowing them to focus on service delivery. This is what unlocking access looks like in practice. It ensures that strong programs are sustainable. In Ohio, CEO is working at the State system level with Jobs and Family Services. We are helping expand third-party partnerships, develop communication tools, and build stronger connections across three different counties. This is not about one organization. It is about enabling an entire state to use the SNAP E&T system more effectively.
Some partnerships focus on infrastructure. Others focus on innovation that can scale across that infrastructure.
In Los Angeles, CEO shows how policy, implementation, and capacity building connect to drive impact. As a first step, CEO helped pass the Los Angeles Fair Chance Ordinance. The next step was making sure it worked in practice: through our partnership with LA County, CEO reached thousands of employers and justice-impacted Angelenos. We helped businesses understand how to comply with the ordinance and helped individuals understand their rights as they navigated their job searches. Policy created the opportunity. Capacity building made it real.
We are also continuing to build new models for partnership and scale. CEO is currently serving as an intermediary for organizations like FreeWorld, helping them onboard into funding systems, identify SNAP E&T components, and draw down funding. In New York, CEO was awarded a contract to distribute reentry stipends through a network of partner organizations, again playing a central role in moving resources through the field.
Across all of this work, the pattern is clear. The organizations exist, the demand exists, and the funding often exists. What is missing is access and the infrastructure to make that access usable. Opportunity 2030 is about closing that gap at scale.
It is about building a national system where community-based organizations can access public funding, deliver high-quality services, and reach far more people than they can today. It is about ensuring that policy, funding, and practice are aligned so that progress is not limited to a handful of programs, but shared across a network.
Every year, more than 600,000 people return from incarceration. We will not reach them all by opening more offices alone. We will reach them by strengthening the organizations already embedded in their communities and giving them the tools to grow.
That is what capacity building makes possible. And that is why it is central to Opportunity 2030.
