Chris Wilson Foundation

The Chris Wilson Foundation was established in 2018 with the mission of transforming the incarceration system by providing and supporting programming, advocacy, and art that centers personal relationships, resilience, development, and agency. Our flagship initiative, the Master Plan Program, was created to provide a socially integrated approach to transforming and rehabilitating incarcerated and reentering individuals. 

The Office of Justice Programs notes that about 70% of justice-impacted individuals have diagnosable mental health problems, often due to histories of trauma. Unlike existing single-solution intervention programs that only address discrete issues of incarceration and trauma, the Master Plan Program provides holistic education, training, and support to incarcerated and reentering individuals. 

The program began as a complement to our founder, Chris Wilson’s book, The Master Plan. In this memoir,  Chris details his journey from a life sentence in prison at age seventeen to an early release, and onto becoming a college graduate, successful business owner, visual artist, and entrepreneur.  Afterward, Chris received hundreds of messages from justice-impacted individuals and their families who described how the book had changed their lives. They, too, had grown up surrounded by addiction and racism, living in homes with regular domestic violence in communities where young Black men were frequently shot and killed. 

Now, after three years of tireless work, The Master Plan Program has now served over three-hundred incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals. 81% of our students identify as Black, and only 24% have completed high school. The Program has also hired a core team of formerly incarcerated mentors who are directly on the ground, providing critical guidance and support within prisons, detention centers, and reentry programs.