Humans Advancing Together provides curriculum and training for the acclaimed Ascend program.
But, first, What is Ascend?
Ascend is a cutting edge rehabilitation program for people who have been incarcerated and/or placed on probation, parole or other forms of supervision. The program has been hailed as a “model for the nation” by criminal justice researchers from Sacramento State University for it’s ground breaking advances in lowering recidivism and increasing public safety. Ascend was co-founded and is co-directed by Christine Morse Fitch and Toni White.
How was Ascend created?
Ascend started simply enough. Two attorneys, Christine and Toni, fiercely determined to help people, ended up at the same criminal law firm. After years of practice, both became disillusioned by the inability of the system to help people effect positive change in their lives. They were also saddened by the enormous amount of suffering they saw in their daily practice. A fast friendship was born as the duo started looking for ways to guide their clients out of the system for good.
Time and time again, Christine and Toni saw clients complete programs only to return to old, troublesome behaviors. The programs to which the clients had access were clearly not working in the long term. What was worse was that the judges and prosecutors did not, as a whole, consider whether a program had research showing that it was effective or whether a particular program was a good clinical fit for a specific client.
Most judges, overworked, overburdened and with few options, would assume that the program was effective (without data or science to back up that assumption) and place 100% blame on the client. This often resulted in harsher sentences for clients who had tried programs and failed.
Christine and Toni saw this lack of program evaluation as the equivalent of getting rid of professor evaluations in a college. Can you imagine if we had colleges turning out a 67% failure rate, we had NO student evaluations, we just ASSUMED that the professors were effective, and we blamed the students? In California, roughly 67% of people coming out of incarceration will return to crime. Yet there is little to no third party verified data or measurement outcomes determining what programs work.
Christine and Toni saw this phenomenon play out over and over. Over the years, they intensified their search for effective rehabilitation options that would help clients towards long-term change. They found none.
Through a shared determination to salvage people from suffering and a certainty that they could craft an effective and innovative solution, the duo set out to create a rehabilitation program unlike anything seen before.
Being attorneys, each was already comfortable with taking in large amounts of information, distilling what would help their cause, consulting experts and finding creative solutions. This was the path that they took when creating Ascend.
Christine and Toni combined their experience from their two individual backgrounds with the experience they had working together in criminal law and co-founded the Ascend Program (www.ascendprogram.com).
Ascend is a non-profit rehabilitation program that helps people learn, among other things, the steps that our brains take when making a decision. Ascend utilizes science-backed practices to help people effect change.
As attorneys, Christine and Toni were naturally used to looking for proof that a method would work before utilizing it. They also knew intuitively that their intuition about what was needed was correct but they wanted validation. They were looking to change peoples’ lives, after all. This is serious business. With that in mind, they knew they needed experts to look at their creative, innovative programming ideas, confirm that their methods would be backed by science and track their progress.
Christine and Toni consulted Sacramento State University’s criminal justice department about Ascend at the program’s inception. Researchers were intrigued and began studying the likely effectiveness of this promising new program. That was in August of 2011.
As stated above, Ascend is now a flourishing program that has been billed by researchers, after a careful study of participants, as a “model for the nation.” The University continues to publish papers on Ascend and has presented the program in two national criminal justice conferences.
Humans Advancing Together
Christine and Toni have made many connections through their innovative approach to rehabilitation. They have learned of others who have had their own innovative and effective approaches to helping people. Christine and Toni are still learning, striving and creating. They needed a place to make this information available to all people looking to advance their lives…from wherever they are starting.
They founded Humans Advancing Together in recognition of the truth that we all learn from each other, that a rising lake raises all boats and that we all deserve to be the best of ourselves and get the very best out of our lives.
HAT Offers Trainings, Curriculum and Workbooks for People on Probation and Parole and Rehabilitation Professionals
Christine and Toni realized that they wanted to help far more people than could be reached through attending the Ascend program so they created a curriculum, complete with worksheets and videos, that other agencies can use to create, or enhance, their own rehabilitation classes.
They also began conducting trainings for other rehabilitation professionals (workforce development professionals, social workers, probation and parole and others who worked in the community).
Meet the Founders
Want to know more about Christine and Toni?
Christine Morse Fitch, Esq. Co-Founder
Christine believes that supporting people to reach their potential in living fulfilling lives increases the quality and the safety of the whole community.
In addition to co-founding Ascend, Christine works as a co-director for the program.
Christine is an expert at teaching all of Ascend’s curriculum but she finds great enjoyment in teaching money management and health. Drawing upon her natural talent for finance and her extensive experience with people struggling with poverty and bankruptcy, Christine is particularly adept at teaching money management to the students. She not only teaches them about budgeting and management techniques, but gives them a broader view of how slick marketing can lure them into make bad decisions that keep them stuck in poverty. Additionally, her research into healthy eating and passion to help the students turn their lives around one meal at a time makes Christine’s health lectures a class favorite. Students love Christine’s teachings.
Christine also possesses a unique ability to translate complex information and programming principles into easy-to-read guides for HAT’s training materials. Due to her experience as both professor and lawyer, Christine is able to draft guides for other professionals who are seeking to implement some of Ascend’s key teachings into their own programs.
As a lawyer, Christine has worked in diverse areas, including education, legislation, bankruptcy and criminal defense. Ascend and rehabilitation programming combine her passion for education and criminal law because it helps move people away from crime through education.
In addition to her work with Ascend and HAT, Christine currently works as a professor in the criminal justice department of Sacramento State University. She is a favored professor among both students and staff at the university and brings a fresh perspective to the classes she teaches given her wide variety of experience.
Christine received her bachelor’s degree in journalism at University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She has traveled extensively beginning with her solo trip to Argentina as a young woman where she taught ESL classes. She then attended McGeorge School of Law where she graduated with her juris doctorate degree and passed the California bar exam on her first attempt.
Christine still loves to travel when she is able. She loves places with warm ocean water and sandy beaches. Some of her happiest, most meditative and joyful moments happen when she is snorkeling.
She loves to write, has had her articles published and is writing a novel in her tiny amount of spare time. She works to achieve life balance through eating healthy, running, rock climbing, practicing mindfulness, yoga and exercising
Toni White, Esq. Co-Founder
Toni is a lawyer who has dedicated her entire career (18 years and counting) to criminal defense work. After seeing the same clients return over and over in her legal practice, Toni is thrilled to have the opportunity to help her clients finally achieve healthy, happy, crime-free lives.
Toni is an expert at teaching all of Ascend’s curriculum but she is incredibly passionate about teaching law both to the students in Ascend and people trying to avoid re-entry into the criminal system. Practicing criminal defense law comes at an emotional cost to Toni. Her deep compassion and empathy for clients means that it hurts her when she sees the clients fail to get the rehabilitation they need at sentencing.
In her 18 years of practice, Toni has not had a single day where she wasn’t worried about a client and/or a client’s case. Every day, day in and day out, she manages this worry while learning more about the law as it evolves and seeing the pathways that lead clients to crime.
Given the depth of her experience, she also has represented thousands of clients and become experienced in analyzing countless cases. Given her vast experience in court, she sees, in real time, how one fact changing in a case can change the outcome. This depth of experience, combined with the knowledge she gained to teach Ascend, makes her a very effective lecturer on the law. All of the years of worry and stress in the practice enable her a unique ability to see how the law will apply in a variety of situations that the Ascend students will face.
She brings a dynamic energy to all of her teachings often following up a multi-hour law teaching session with the use props and games that get the students laughing as they learn how to apply the law they just learned. She teaches them the law of “guilt by association” so that they understand the danger in being involved with people doing risky behaviors so that they can avoid sticky situations that could lead them to unintentionally getting involved in crime in the future. She also has a deep compassion, empathy and authenticity that draws students to her.
Toni received her bachelor’s degree from University of California, Santa Barbara with a major in political science and a minor in Japanese language. She subsequently attended McGeorge School of Law where she received her juris doctorate degree and passed the California bar exam on her first attempt. She then began practicing criminal defense law.
Toni has been a vegetarian for over 22 years and is passionate about eating healthy, organic food. She loves adventure and finds great peace through outdoor activities. She is happiest when sitting atop a mountain, running long distances, rock climbing, kayaking on a glassy lake watching the sunset or doing yoga in a quiet meadow.
Next Steps…
If you are a rehabilitation professional, including and especially workforce professionals, interested in a training or curriculum to enhance your rehabilitation programming, click on the training and curriculum menu items on our home page.
If you are a person on probation or parole interested in learning more about the successful Ascend program, go to www.ascendprogram.com.
If you are either a rehabilitation professional or person interested in learning about how the guilt by association laws taught in Ascend, as well as other, more in depth, information about criminal law, visit Toni’s blog at www.reasonabledoubtinsideout.com.