Navigator was designed and built with formerly incarcerated co-designers and piloted with a 10-person cohort.
Reentry in the United States is a $2.8B annual spend with structurally poor outcomes. Recidivism in the first year of release sits around 44%. The people moving through the system are routed through a maze of fragmented service providers with no continuous record of what they actually need, what they've already received, or what worked.
I learned this from inside the system. I served five years in California state custody between November 2018 and 2023. On the day of my release, I did not know I was getting out until that morning. My family had been guessing at the date for weeks. The product that would have answered the questions I needed answered — when do I get out, what credits move that number, who picks me up, where do I sleep tonight, where do I work next week — did not exist for me.
I founded Dignifi Collective in May 2024, immediately after completing CROP Organization's reentry housing and design program. $500K seed from CROP Organization plus two grants with Alameda County Probation — $600K in total funding.
"Building product for justice-involved people is not a UX problem dressed up as a mission. It is a distribution problem with a UX layer on top. The product has to find the user where they actually are."
Navigator is a human-led reentry support service backed by a digital intake and matching layer. It was designed and built with formerly incarcerated co-designers and piloted with a 10-person cohort.
The product decisions that define v1:
In January 2026 I attended the People in Blue resource fair inside San Quentin State Prison as a Dignifi representative. People in Blue is the resident-led group at SQ that organizes peer programming. Over the course of the fair I sat one-on-one with 100+ incarcerated men.
Each conversation closed on a physical contact card that captured CDCR number, a short survey of reentry fears, and an opt-in to receive text messages from Dignifi. 100+ contact cards were captured from one-on-one conversations inside San Quentin.
The three categories of fear that dominated:
I now text those contacts from my personal phone. Just trying to get people a leg up. That texting work surfaced the constraint that's driving the next product surface.
Texting works for the post-release cohort but breaks for the still-inside cohort, which is the cohort whose reentry questions matter most. Communication inside facilities is asymmetric: incarcerated people can dial out, but cannot reliably receive inbound texts or calls. Inbound channels are facility-mediated and unreliable.
The hypothesis emerging from the SQ texting work: build a phone number residents can dial out to from inside a facility, with an LLM-powered voice agent on the other end. The agent answers reentry questions, captures intake, schedules navigator follow-ups, and routes anything human-required to a real person. Prototype is currently being built.
10 partner organizations onboarded.
Founder-operator scope across two years. The artifact inventory I built by hand:
If any of this resonates — as a partner, a funder, a fellow operator, or a person looking for the kind of work I've described — get in touch.
Today, Dignifi is me and Jenny, who volunteers her time. Michelle and Tidjane advise, and Eddy holds our board seat.
Dignifi lost its funding in 2026 and has since been scaled down to a volunteer-run project. The mission hasn't changed.
If you're building product for justice-involved people, hiring for it, or have lived experience and want to compare notes — reach out.