If there is anyone who knows about second chances, it's Cat Hoke , the mastermind behind Defy Ventures, a program that brings entrepreneurship to the incarcerated and formerly incarcerated and supports them to become successful, legal entrepreneurs and employees.  She likes to say she "transforms the hustle".  The recidivism rate for the participants in Defy is less than 5% and many of these individuals leave the prison system not just employable but as employers and business owners.  Cat Hoke is no stranger to second chances. She is a woman who has reinvented herself numerous times, and she has made some mistakes and rebounded. She continues to innovate in her work because she has no choice but to be a learner, experimenter and trailblazer. This month we asked our writers to respond to the following prompt. If ______________ was a guest innovator/employee at my school, we would be doing ______________ differently. So for all the reasons above Cat Hoke is my pick for guest innovator.

1. We would be deeply empathetic and human.   When you read Cat Hoke's book A Second Chance , you understand what real empathy is. Hoke has the ability to see herself in everyone around her and to see others in herself.  She knows that we are all connected by our ability to mess up; she says it's not a matter of if but when." She works with the most marginalized of all people - prisoners who have done the worst crimes and the hardest time - and helps them to get a second chance in the world.  She connects them with entrepreneurs outside of prison who also have to develop a shared sense of empathy and to recognize that had they had the same backgrounds and childhoods as these prisoners, the roles could very likely be reversed. If Cat were at our school we would understand that we are no better than anyone else and that our actions always have a backstory and some of us just have had an easier road to travel than others.
    
2. We would reframe our narratives - both our institutional and personal narratives.  The stories we tell ourselves about our schools, our students and ourselves are often distorted and limiting.  They often come from a specific and memorable moment (either positive or negative) which has been mythologized in some way - either an epic failure we can't seem to recover from or a moment of glory that we we can seem to live up to.  Cat Hoke is the master of reframing the narrative and of transforming the "illegal hustle" into the "generous hustle." She doesn't let the narrative run the show. She knows that it takes hard work to reinvent oneself or an organization - especially back from a moment of challenge.  "It takes courage, humility, commitment, effort, and time. It takes admitting that we didn't have it figured out the last time around. It involves finding the time to recover and embracing the process. It involves asking for help. It involves being vulnerable. It involves a decent possibility of failing all over again."  But by exploring and examining the stories we tell, we can begin to tell different stories those that allow us to identify our "gifts, passions and generous hustle." Hoke suggest that we "stop the trash talking [to ourselves], we might escape our own prisons."
    
3. We would be relentlessly optimistic - and never give up on anyone - our students, our peers or ourselves.  Cat Hoke says that at Defy Ventures, "We unlock potential everywhere we find it."  Imagine if that was the mindset of everyone at your school. What would that look like to believe in the potential of every student - even the ones that are a little messier and maybe little less easy to love and the ones that aren't so compliant or the ones who struggle at school and who don't always make the best decisions?  Maybe even the student who has lied or who consistently says hurtful things to other kids deserve to be valued and respected. What about your colleague who might be hard to work with or who approaches every new suggestion with the phrase "We tried that in 1985." We would know that there is possibility and potential in even the hardest people for us to accept.  Most of all ourselves. We would be free from our own cultures of judgment and perfectionism, and we would accept our own flaws and failures, and in that acceptance of ourselves see the gifts in others.

If you are attending the NAIS Annual Conference next week or if you are attending SXSW - keep an eye out for some L+Doers in your midst.