Project winners of The New Challenge, Drive Change is gaining recognition. Check out the article written in Brooklyn Based.
We love food trucks because they promise a delicious break from the monotony of another sad desk lunch. Jordyn Lexton looked at our city’s mobile meal options and saw vehicles for social empowerment, so she started Drive Change, a business that builds and designs food trucks to hire and train formerly incarcerated youth offenders in the culinary arts.
Lexton’s three years teaching at East River Academy, a public school at Rikers Island, inspired Drive Change, which she founded and runs with Annie Bickerton, its development director. In New York State, defendants as young as 16 years old can be tried as adults, and many of her students were young offenders dealing with life in an adult prison, rife with, as Bickerton puts it, “insurmountable barriers.” Lexton and Bickerton aim to use food as way to provide the stable jobs that Lexton’s former students need to break the cycle of recidivism–according to the New York State Office of Children and Family Services 66% of youth offenders return to prison within a year of release.
