Tiffany Kirk saw that math up close, from more than one side. She started as an elementary school teacher in St. Paul from 2001 to 2005, then moved into bank community development in 2006, spending a decade of that career at Regions Bank. The entire time, on her own hours, she was teaching financial literacy inside Minnesota’s prisons to people the system had already written off, not as a detour between jobs but running the whole way through, nearly two decades of it. Somewhere in there, she stopped seeing two separate problems and started seeing one: people weren’t failing to stay out, they were being handed exactly two options, go back to what got them locked up, or scrape by on a wage that guarantees they’ll never get ahead of it. Nobody was building a third option. So in 2020, while still working in banking, she built one herself.
She called it Project Restart. Twelve weeks, three lanes, education, employment, and ownership, and at the end of it, real money. Not a certificate and a handshake, an actual pitch for capital, judged, funded, and handed over so a graduate can start the business or finish the credential they came in wanting. That last part is the whole point. Plenty of reentry programs teach a skill and call it done. Tiffany’s answer was: teach the skill, then fund the plan, because a certificate without capital behind it is just a nicer way of saying good luck.
The strategy underneath it is quietly the smartest part. Atlanta already had reentry organizations working this problem, mentorship here, job placement there, financial coaching somewhere else, all of them good, all of them separate. Tiffany’s first move wasn’t to build something new to compete with them. It was to connect what already existed into one network instead of a dozen competing ones, so a person walking through Project Restart’s door gets routed to the right resource instead of having to find it themselves, one closed door at a time. Her second move was raising real capital, from the bank she used to work for and from private donors, specifically so those microgrants at the end of the program would be real money, not a symbolic prize. Since 2020, that’s added up to over $200,000 raised and more than $75,000 granted directly into alumni hands, across 139 graduates.
In 2024, Kirk left banking altogether and became Executive Director of Common Good Atlanta, bringing accredited college courses inside Georgia’s prison classrooms. “Access to higher education is a human right,” she said at the time, “and it’s the primary solution to reducing recidivism.” Same conviction that built Project Restart, aimed at an even bigger wall.
Twenty months later, in April 2026, she made another leap: back to Project Restart, this time full time. The program now teaches life skills, workforce readiness, financial wellness, and mindset work directly inside two Georgia correctional facilities, reaching people before release instead of waiting for it.
Eighty years ago, Septima Poinsette Clark ran nearly 900 Citizenship Schools across the South, teaching literacy so Black adults could clear the tests standing between them and a ballot. She wasn’t just teaching people to read, she was dismantling a system built specifically to keep them out. Tiffany Kirk is doing the same work with a different lock: teaching literacy, financial skills, and now life skills and workforce readiness from inside the walls themselves, so people the system tried to shut out permanently can clear the barriers standing between them and a job, a lease, a future. Same fire, eighty years and a different wall.
The system handed Tiffany Kirk two bad options and called it a choice. She built a third one, connected it to people who’d been fighting the same fight alone, and put real capital behind it. What’s the wall in your community that nobody’s built a door through yet?
