Meet YPEI's Assistant Director, Vanessa Estimé

Meet YPEI's Assistant Director, Vanessa Estimé, profiled in a recent feature posted by University of New Haven:

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Vanessa Estimé ’14 is excited to be serving as assistant director for the Yale Prison Education Initiative (YPEI) at Dwight Hall at Yale. Through the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of New Haven is collaborating with YPEI to create a degree-granting program for incarcerated students in Connecticut, and Estimé is looking forward to helping to lead this important work.

YPEI’s work speaks to and meets the great need of providing college access to incarcerated individuals in Connecticut and throughout the world,” she said. “Education has changed lives, families, and communities for the better. Why not extend it to individuals who, historically and still today, have been excluded from such opportunities and provide them with a chance to change the trajectory of their lives?

My students are linguists, artists, and researchers,” she continues. “They are fantastic writers and orators. They think critically, wrestle with texts and concepts, and engage in valuable discourse with one another. I bear witness to and am in awe of their collective potential and know that this program can be just the beginning. Investing in lives is my purpose and life’s work, and I am grateful to be working in this dynamic and radical space of higher education in prison.

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See the full profile at this link.