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Amy Jurgens knows a thing or two about starting over. As director of the SCC Entrepreneurship Center, she teaches people how they can take an idea and turn it into a business. That’s what brought her to teaching students in the UPWARD program.

Jessica Whittaker drives a bus for the Omaha Regional Transit Authority through the same city where she committed her crimes. She got there, she will tell you, by way of a phrase: “Can you Amy this?”

Tammy Zimmer knows what it means to have the deck stacked against you. Her mother had her and her twin sister at 16 and her father didn’t finish high school. Poverty wasn’t a circumstance in her childhood; it was the landscape.

Chad Finch goes to work, goes to church, and is planning his next degree. He is also serving year 15 of a 20-year sentence—a fact he no longer expects to define him.

Where others see an ending, Dawn-Renee Smith sees a beginning. . As the force behind the groundbreaking partnership between the NDCS and SCC, she helps incarcerated individuals imagine a future worth working toward.

Ricky Sanders sits with a small group of men in a workroom at the Center for People every Sunday. He walks these men through one of seven principles: Maturity, Accountability, Nobility, Honesty, Organization, Opportunity, and Discipline.

Tommy Moore left prison in 2009 chasing a bachelor’s degree without a car and 12 miles of road between him and Lake Sumter Community College. He pedaled. Every. Single. Day. Now he has a Ph.D. and teaches in the UPWARD program.

Grant Showalter tutors adult education students at SCC and helps students in the UPWARD program navigate the Professional Truck Driver Training program. It's a big deal because not long ago he was an UPWARD student.

Dean Amy Doty spent 10 years in a Nebraska prison and has spent the years since teaching the system to look at people who land there the way she wishes someone had looked at her: not as the worst day of their life, but as the rest of it.