Hello everyone… I’m pondering a vision I shared with a friend Saturday evening and am sharing it here to gather input from anyone who may be interested. This vision is a confluence of three different things: Prison ministry, a faith-based addiction rehab facility (local to where I live), and my start-up (Next Level Character). The recidivism rate in the US is 40%. Post-prison people struggle with housing and work, which when they fail to hold either thing, leads them right back to crime and then to prison. The local rehab facility - One-Eighty (search The One-Eighty Zone, Davenport, IA) - has saved the State of Iowa millions of dollars from all the people they’ve taken into One-Eighty. If they complete the program successfully, they will never spend a day in the Graybar Motel. If they don’t...you know the rest. Next Level Character (NLC) - my background in high-stakes certification testing has been the basis for the development of NLC. I’ve adapted the processes from the testing world directly onto the assessment development process for NLC and everything I’ve done works as if it were developed for creating character assessments. I’m a social scientist with expertise in social science measurement, objective measurement, educational testing (educational measurement), fundamental measurement. These terms all mean the same thing. I’ve created a process for certifying the character of people who take my assessment and have up to five others (a minimum of two - subject to review) take the assessment for someone as a character reference for them (in other words, when taking the assessment they are responding to the assessment items with that person’s character in mind). As long as the responses and measures are similar enough the subject/client/post-prison person will have a “certified character assessment.” As the reputation of NLC spreads across the nation, post-prison people, or even One-Eighty graduates, will have gained a leg-up on keeping their new life in tact as they’ll be able to acquire and hold housing and employment. One-Eighty - it is a single outpost at this time. Part of my vision is taking its current format and duplicating it across the country. With my own network, Nexus, and other faith-based groups, I’m certain we can gain footholds in many areas (not just major metropolitan areas like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles). The Quad Cities (Moline and Rock Island, IL & Davenport and Bettendorf, IA) is an area of roughly 350,000 people. Just within my network alone and social media groups to which I belong, I know we can place One-Eighty all around the country. With the Kingdom finances that He would make available to this project, I’m sure this project would flourish. Prison ministry (PM) - when this initial vision came to me in 2019, I went from knowing two or three people in prison ministry to being up to my neck with people who are deeply entrenched in PM (I am not naming names). I was stunned. These people are well connected within PM. My vision brings these three things together and unites them. Like I said, One-Eighty is a single outpost in the Quad Cities and it alone is saving the State of Iowa millions of dollars. Imagine how much it could save states across the country. Then add to that, the reduction in the recidivism rate and all of a sudden we have 1000s and 1000s of new contributors to the economy and have taken a huge burden off state budgets. This is confidential. I’m only a volunteer with One-Eighty. Please keep this locked down to this group. You can share my name and contact info with others you think would be interested. This is a high level view of what this could be. I invite your questions and feedback. Thank you Patrick pfisher@SportsMeasures.com

Posted by Patrick Fisher at 2022-10-24 03:59:42 UTC