#LIFEAFTER

The problem of resocialization of people with a prison background is very acute in Russia. 58% of prisoners return to jail within six months after leaving it.

While serving a sentence, a person loses relevant professional skills. When they leave prison, they are branded as criminals, it is hard for them to get a job and return to the society.

Skillbox’s mission — access to modern education without restrictions (including social ones). In solving this problem we also saw an opportunity to create a new niche in EdTech. 

#Lifeafter — education for people who are still in prison or who have recently been released from there. The project provides an opportunity to get modern digital skills and radically change your life. Skillbox believes that education is an effective way to re-enter society for those with a prison background.

We understood that we could not show up at the colonies with an online educational platform, so in order to implement our strategy, we needed to launch a resonant campaign and start discussion within the society.

We decided to change the taboo nature and negative attitude towards this problem by testing a hypothesis: we set up a social experiment with 4 former prisoners from different regions of the Russian Federation.

We documented their learning process for 9 months and turned it into a film to draw attention to the problem and start a discussion.

At the moment of the highest tension associated with the outflow of IT personnel from the country, in order to increase the resonance, we decided to scale the experiment and issue additional 100 grants.

The second stage is the publication of a study on the results of training a group of grantees and scaling up the public discussion.