OXFORD, Miss. – Students and faculty from the University of Mississippi Department of Legal Studies recently joined forces with the Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs to pack more than 100,000 meals in one day for an organization that helps needy children.
Linda Keena, interim chair for the Department of Legal Studies, teaches restorative justice and entrepreneurship courses to a group of maximum-security inmates at the facility, where the idea for the project got its start. The inmates first had to pass the Ice House Entrepreneurship class as a prerequisite to the restorative justice class to participate in the food-packing event, Keena said.
“The Ice House Entrepreneurship class teaches them to look at how to solve other people’s problems instead of looking at how they alone can benefit, because that is what successful entrepreneurs do,” Keena said. “It was actually one of the offender’s capstone projects from the class that sparked the idea for the event as a social entrepreneurship endeavor.”
Gary Schoeniger, founder and CEO of Entrepreneurial Learning Initiative and co-author of the Ice House Entrepreneurship book, flew in from his headquarters in Ohio for the packing event. Schoeniger and Keena have spoken at venues across the country, sharing the effective use of the Ice House Entrepreneurship program in prison systems.
Read the full press release here.