Ramiah Whiteside is a community organizer and coordinator for EXPO (EX-incarcerated People Organizing) and is heavily involved with its RVP Program. Whiteside created the first of its kind Relational Voter Program in Wisconsin to include incarcerated men and women. The program seeks to increase voter engagement by encouraging people who are currently incarcerated to speak with their support systems on topics like voting and politics. “For the people involved in this program, it was one of the first times they were able to call home and say, ‘I don’t want shoes. I don’t want money. I don’t want anything material. I want to know what you know about politics.’ And that started Ramiah Whiteside, an EXPO Community Organizer Organizing Change
an ongoing conversation,”Whiteside said. More than 200 people committed to having those conversations with at least 10 of their friends and relatives, which resulted in 4,000 people registering to vote.
“The gist of these programs reminded me that I needed to work on myself...” restorative justice programs. “The gist of these programs reminded me that I needed to work on myself and make some changes internally Whiteside has been working with EXPO for about a year. He first found out about the program during his 25-year prison sentence. “When I was imprisoned in the early 90s, the system was much more barbaric than it is today. You didn’t have a lot to pick from if you wanted to be productive. There were a lot of distractions, so it was much easier to get involved in negativity and destructive situations than it was the positive things.”To increase his opportunities for productive change, Whiteside began seeking any available
- Ramiah Whiteside
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