We are a 501(c)(3) charity and all donations are tax deductible

About Us

Fair Shake Founder and Director

Sue Kastensen founded Fair Shake in 2009 and is currently the executive director. She created Sun Dog Hemp Body Care in 1993, which is now owned by Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. She graduated from Walden III, an alternative High School in Racine, WI, and 26 years later received her bachelor’s degree in Individualized Learning from Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. In 2019, Sue received her Masters of Education from Rutgers University.  She is a member of the Correctional Educators Association and, in 2015, received the distinguished Ralph Kaplan Memorial Award for Dedication to Technological Advancement in Correctional Education Settings. She has been invited to the White House twice: in 2015, for her use of technology within a prison setting and again in 2016, as a Champion of Change for Expanding Fair Chance Opportunities. She serves her community by participating in both the Planning Commission and the Variance Committee for the City of Westby. She envisioned and developed Fair World Project in 2008. Sue is the former board chair for MOSA, an organic certification agency; former board chair for the Domestic Fair Trade Association and former board chair for the Viroqua Food Coop in Viroqua, Wisconsin.

Sue had no experience working in a prison setting and is now considered a reentry expert. She travels around the country in her ‘bubble truck’ to talk about Fair Shake: she shares what she’s built so far, and learns from folks in state and federal prisons so she can make Fair Shake better and better.

About Fair Shake

Fair Shake is focused on the most important resource for reentry success: the person coming home.

To this end, we provide free resources and information to incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, their friends and families and other vital reentry stakeholders.

Prisons focus on safety and security. They do not offer lists of current resources and rely on outside organizations to provide this information. Many prisons allow private organizations (e.g. schools, religious organizations, and entrepreneurship programs) to come in and reach their target audiences via a variety of structured programming. But programming does not provide the freedom of self-directed exploration, and it does not reach everyone.

Incarcerated people are no different from the rest of us; all adults want to search, review, and decide for ourselves which resources will be the most beneficial for the trajectory that we would like our lives to take. We want to see how things connect to prioritize our goals. And we want the freedom to look around – without being subject to someone else’s agenda – so we can reflect, weigh our values, commitments and options, and own our decisions.

By providing resources, curated websites, educational manuals and interactive tools Fair Shake provides our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated neighbors with access to the resources and information they need to carve out their own unique path to successful re-entry.  We actively maintain these ever-changing resources and give them to state and federal prisons free of charge. For the past 10 years, more than 200 state and federal prisons have been sharing Fair Shake’s information on their websites and with those incarcerated in their institutions. In fact, many institutions have one or more copies of our 200-page “Reentry Ownership Manual,” our guide to supportive re-entry resources, in the prison library.

Contact Us

Fair Shake

PO Box 63

Westby, WI 54667                                       Email us at information(at)fairshake(dot)net

Vision / Mission

    Vision

Fair Shake is dedicated to supporting the successful reintegration of formerly incarcerated people into society.

Mission

Fair Shake is dedicated to increasing reentry success through personal and community focused ownership and engagement opportunities for currently and formerly incarcerated individuals in connection with families, employers, property managers, corrections and communities.

Beliefs

The primary belief Fair Shake holds are:

  • Belief in redemption.
  • Belief in success after incarceration.
  • Belief that we can build a strong, safe society.
  • Belief that we are all important, valuable and connected.

 

Fair Shake is based on the UBUNTU operating system.  (The UBUNTU philosophy, that is.)

Fair Shake Provides

  • >   Free reentry information, available to all and curated for stakeholder groups.
  • >   A free interactive website – free of cost, and free from tracking, nudging, and data collection
  • >   Free software for prisons and jails (an offline ‘app’ of the entire website!)
  • >   Ownership Manual to encourage critical thinking, employee considerations, relationship and   
  •          language skills, accountability and transition preparation
  • >   Free Resource Directory; a database of useful and relevant re-entry resources

Board of Directors

  • Sue Kastensen – President
  • Bentley Lein –  Vice – President
  • Kreigh Rasikas – Secretary

Fair Shake founding principals

  • We are free when we own everything we are about.
  • Each of us is in charge of our own success and satisfaction in life.
  • Each of us has the right to know ourselves and to learn about living in society and a democracy.
  • We have the right to understand how to build and search for the meaning in our lives.
  • We cannot outsource care.

Benefits of Fair Shake

  • 24 hour access to tools found in the website
  • Free Personal Web Page and Data Storage hosting for formerly incarcerated individuals
  • A large and constantly growing Resource Directory
  • A free, print-from-the-website Reentry Ownership Manual
  • Multi-stakeholder approach!  We all have a role to play to support reentry success
  • Self-empowering, ubuntu-building, non-authoritative approach
  •  Emotional learning opportunities, and – coming soon – the Fair Shake FREE SCHOOL
  • In-prison conversation-presentations, with an emphasis on idea sharing