At the 2021 Essence Festival of Culture Wealth & Power stage, prison reform advocate Tonesa Welch opened her remarks with a common theme during a panel on incarceration: “our past doesn’t have to dictate our futures.” She was joined by panelist Syrita Steib-Martin, the Executive Direction of Operation Restoration and moderator Topeka K. Sam, founder of The Ladies of Hope Ministries in a conversation on their experiences being justice-involved and their fight to help women and girls who have also gone through the system. Syrita Steib-Martin said she became a social entrepreneur and started her organization Operation Restoration out of necessity. “When I was released from prison, I didn’t realize that after my sentence and me coming home I would have multiple barriers that no one spoke to me about prior to. So not being able to secure safe housing, not be able to get a job, not even be able to go back to college because you have to check the box on the application in order to get into school, and that was a way that people were discriminated against…I got tired of not being able to get a career.” Steib-Martin’s Operation Restoration supports women and girls like her impacted by incarceration.