Glenn E. Martin: Entrepreneur, Activist, and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA

We were honored to host Glenn E. Martin, entrepreneur, activist, and the founder and former president of JustLeadershipUSA, as our September 2023 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenter. Glenn gave us both halves of his story, the two decades of building after prison and the two years after he was pushed out of the organization he founded. You can watch the full recording above.

If you are newly home and cannot get a callback, or you are further along and something you spent years building has just been taken from you, this is the hour. Glenn has been in both places, and he talks about the second one as plainly as the first, which is rarer than it should be.

Fifty job rejections in thirty days with a criminal record

Glenn served six years in New York State prison and earned a two year liberal arts degree inside. It did not survive contact with a hiring manager. He spent about thirty days visiting about fifty employers and was turned down by every one, on the criminal record and on little else, fifty rejections built on the recidivism story the numbers do not support. If you have sat through our Building A New Life After Prison session or heard Louis L. Reed on the same wall, this is that hour with the numbers attached.

What broke the streak was one person. A formerly incarcerated man named George Lino, who ran a reentry program, showed up at Glenn’s house almost every day to get him out of bed and back out looking. Glenn has not seen him in more than twenty years and has never forgotten his name.

The job Lino eventually called about was front desk clerk at the Legal Action Center. The pay did almost nothing against the $83,000 Glenn owed in fines, fees, restitution and child support, and he took it anyway, for a reason that is not the one most people assume. It is the same calculation plenty of our members are running right now, underneath collateral consequences nobody warned them about and a restitution and forfeiture number nobody explained.

Why funders say no to an idea that is too early

On his way out of that first job, six years before JustLeadershipUSA existed, Glenn told one of the field’s major funders he was ready to build his own organization. He remembers the corner, the time of day, the day of the week. She looked him in the face and said he was not ready. He was furious. He now says she was 110 percent right.

When he finally did go, he left roughly $175,000 a year with nothing lined up except a thirteen page concept paper that started on a napkin. He still has the photograph.

Anytime you do something that is ahead of the idea curve, you’re probably ahead of the funding curve.

His way through was not to argue anyone into agreement but to move people from a flat no to a question, and he is specific about how you do that without pushing away the people whose money you need. He raised on that question, built a membership in all fifty states, and launched the campaign to close Rikers, which turned him from an asset the sector liked into an agitator it did not. Funders kept asking why he would not just keep doing the trainings and the graduations.

When people saw him on stage with John Legend, they read a man who wanted to be near celebrities. It was a campaign that had lost the messaging fight to City Hall, reaching for a voice that carried further than his own.

What happens after you get pushed out of the organization you founded?

Glenn’s phrase for his exit is that moving on is a euphemism for getting kicked out. Jeff asked about the two years that followed, and Glenn did not soften it: six to eight months of clear suicidal ideation, an inability to get out of bed or put his feet on the floor. The higher up you are, he said, the more precipitous the fall.

The specific cruelty was who did it. He had spent seventeen years around people who talk about due process and second chances for a living.

Except this time, the prison guards were my progressive re-entry and criminal justice reform colleagues, but clearly they had sentenced me to an amount of time where I could no longer be part of society.

That comparison is also where he found the way out, because he had served a sentence and knew the shape of one. This one had no release date, and as he points out, we have no ceremony for bringing anybody back, only the kind of second chance that arrives with a punishment attached.

He also counted, by accident. His phone had gotten slow, so he went hunting for storage to free up and found seventeen thousand contacts. When he was at his lowest, eight or ten of those people reached out to ask whether he and his children were okay. Some of them were on this call. He says it without bitterness, which is the part that only lands in his own voice.

About Glenn E. Martin

Glenn E. Martin spent more than two decades founding and directing national organizations in the nonprofit sector. He began at the Legal Action Center, then moved to the Fortune Society as associate vice president, where he launched the David Rothenberg Center for Public Policy and helped grow the organization from about $10 million to $20 million. He founded JustLeadershipUSA as a tribute to his son Joshua, dedicated to cutting the United States correctional population in half by 2030, and led its campaign to close Rikers. He now runs GEMtrainers, a nonprofit consultancy, and GEMrealestate, a multi-state investment company that rehabilitates housing in low income markets and rents to people with records.

This presentation was free, open to all, and held on Zoom on September 12, 2023 at 7 PM ET. It is part of the Tuesday Night Speaker Series hosted by the White Collar Support Group, which meets every Monday evening on Zoom.