What is Project Candlestick?

Project Candlestick is a program that provides professional life coaching to people who are re-creating their lives and pursuing their dreams after incarceration. It was created in partnership between Hearthstone Coaching and Bonafide, a non-profit organization dedicated to ensuring that people affected by incarceration have the support they need to integrate into society and build healthy, fulfilling lives. Project Candlestick is also supported by the Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States return home from prison each year. They return with dreams of family, freedom, livelihood, and community transformation. Those dreams range from world transformation to simple life experiences that most of us take for granted, like seeing the ocean or going to a ballgame!

But the impact of the prison experience and the daunting challenges of reentry can make fulfilling those dreams far out of reach. That’s where high-quality coaching can make a huge difference: supporting people in reentry to unleash their potential, overcome hurdles, and create new possibilities for achieving their dreams. Most importantly, coaching imparts the gift of seeing each individual as what's possible in their future and not what's happened in their past.

Many coaches yearn to make a difference in communities outside our own, but inertia, fear, or the need to make a living keep us working within our current social realms. Our clients are often affluent and privileged, far removed from the communities most disadvantaged by our carceral system. The result is that coaching, with all of its sincere intentions and empowering possibilities, can be a vehicle for perpetuating privilege, inequity, and the wealth gap. Candlestick is a vehicle for your desire to get out of your comfort zone and use your gifts as a coach in a way that diminishes inequity and expands possibility for all.