We Know This Road.
We’re Still Walking It.
If you’re reading this, you may be in one of the hardest seasons of your life. Your loved one is incarcerated — or coming home soon — and you’re trying to figure out what comes next. You feel the weight of it. The uncertainty. The grief. The hope you’re almost afraid to feel. We know that place. We’ve lived there for ten years.
Our Story
Our son has been incarcerated for a decade. When it first happened, we were lost. The early years were filled with grief, confusion, and questions we didn’t know how to answer. We questioned everything — ourselves, our family, our future. There were days we didn’t know how to take the next step. But slowly, we found our footing. And as we did, something began to shift in us. We started asking a different question — not why did this happen — but what can we do with it? We didn’t know yet what that would look like. The idea for this foundation didn’t come until much later, as our son’s release began to approach and we started searching for resources to help our family prepare. What we found — or rather, didn’t find — shocked us. There was almost nothing out there for families like ours. No clear roadmap. No one who had been through it reaching back to say here’s what helped us. So we decided to become that for someone else.
Where we are right now…
Our son comes home in 70 days. We’re not writing this from the other side of the story — we’re in the middle of it, just like you might be. Right now we’re doing the work of reintegration in real time: family counseling, preparing a space for him to come home to, having honest conversations with extended family, setting realistic expectations, and carefully thinking through what his immediate needs will be — medically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. We’re documenting what we’re learning as we go, so that what we discover can be useful to the next family walking this road.
“They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do.”
Psalm 1:3
What We Offer
The Rise and Ascend Foundation exists to do two things:
We resource you.
We connect families with the organizations and services that can actually help — halfway houses, job placement programs, therapists experienced with reentry, and more. We do the legwork of finding what’s out there so you don’t have to start from scratch.
We Walk Alongside You.
Beyond information, we offer something harder to find — the presence of people who have been through it. We can offer encouragement, share wisdom from our own experience, answer questions you’re embarrassed to ask anyone else, and simply be a steady voice that says: you can do this, and you don’t have to do it alone.
A Note From Mike and Jennifer
We started this foundation not because we had all the answers, but because we know what it feels like to search for them and come up empty. We’re parents. We love our son deeply. And we believe that no family should have to navigate this journey in isolation. If you’re in the thick of it right now, we want you to know — there is hope on the other side of this. Reintegration is hard, but it’s possible. Families do heal. Lives do change. And every step forward, no matter how small, matters. We’d be honored to walk this road with you.
— Mike & Jennifer
Founders, The Rise and Ascend Foundation