Hitting the Gym to Change Lives — and Attitudes About Incarceration

he nonprofit InnerCity Weightlifting runs three gyms in Boston, and a fourth is scheduled to open in the spring. The organization aims to empower people who were incarcerated or otherwise involved with the criminal-justice system to increase their income by becoming certified as personal trainers.

“It flips all the power dynamics,” says Jon Feinman, the group’s founder. “We get CEOs of companies, young up-and-coming professionals coming to the gym — not to do something for someone but because they value that person as a fitness professional.”

Over time, the relationship between trainer and client moves beyond the transaction of a training session to something more personal, where each connects and recognizes the other’s shared humanity, Feinman says. “You get this true bridging of social capital.”

For program participants, expanded social networks can lead to opportunities for greater economic mobility, such as learning about and winning a new job, sometimes with a client serving as a reference. One participant recently started a carpentry business, and some of his first customers were training clients who hired him for home-improvement projects.

Working with and getting to know trainers in the program can also have a profound effect on clients — and that’s by design, Feinman says. He wants people who are privileged to look in the mirror and think about the role they play in systems that support institutional racism and mass incarceration.

“A lot of times in the nonprofit world, we focus on changing the people in our program because they are up against these barriers and circumstances, especially when we’re talking about people coming out of incarceration,” he says. “What ownership of that burden to change is on us as a collective society, rather than putting that all on the individual who is also trying to simultaneously overcome the barriers that we created in the first place.”