Organizations & partners
For the people working where the support runs out.
Upstream is a decision-making companion built on a framework written by a formerly incarcerated author. It’s designed for exactly the period most programs can’t reach into: the first months out, when the decisions come fast and the support structure is thinnest.
This page is for reentry organizations, programs, and learning platforms evaluating whether it fits.
The gap
Release is when the decisions get harder and the scaffolding comes down.
Inside, there’s structure: programming, counsellors, a schedule, people who know the situation. Out, most of that ends on a date, and what replaces it is a run of consequential decisions made alone and made quickly — housing, work, contact, money, who to trust, how much of your history to hand over to a stranger who just asked.
Almost nothing in the toolkit addresses that directly. Case management tracks compliance. Content libraries teach. Neither of them sits with a person at eleven at night while they decide whether to answer a specific phone call. That’s the gap Upstream is built for.
What it is
In one paragraph, for an evaluator.
A person describes a decision they’re circling. Upstream asks about the part they’re steering around, using a framework called Dual Accountability that holds two opposing truths at once rather than resolving them. At the end, it writes back what was named — the thread, an optional small step, and the pattern underneath if there genuinely is one. That summary carries forward, so the next conversation starts from what the person already worked out rather than from zero.
It is deliberately not therapy, not advice, and not a crisis service. Crisis-flagged input never reaches the model at all — it’s intercepted before any call is made and answered with a fixed resource block. The safety posture is written up here.
Provenance
The framework wasn’t written for an app.
Dual Accountability comes from LANDMINES: What Happened to Me by Demetrius Wright, worked out over years inside and since. It holds that a person is shaped by what happened to them and responsible for what they do next — not fifty-fifty, both at full weight — and it is explicit that this is not the same as flattening real harm into false balance.
For this audience that provenance is not a marketing detail. It’s the difference between a method that lands and one that gets recognised as written by someone who has never had to use it.
More on where it comes from →“Your pain is real and valid — and you are not powerless in the present.”
What it needs to run
Constraints it already meets.
Runs in a browser
No native app, no app-store review, no install. It works on a phone, a tablet or a shared terminal with a browser on it.
Light on data
Text-first. No video, no required audio. Voice exists and is optional, not load-bearing.
Free at the entry point
Five conversations a month with the full framework, no card. Nothing about the method is behind a paywall.
No account chain
A person signs up for themselves with an email. It isn’t provisioned by a facility and it isn’t tied to a case file.
Working together
What a pilot looks like.
- 01
Scope a cohort
A defined group with a defined window — typically people in the weeks either side of release, where decision density is highest and existing support thins out fastest.
- 02
Agree what we’d learn
Usage is the easy metric and the least interesting one. The questions worth answering are whether people come back unprompted, and whether the wrap-up notes are something they actually use.
- 03
Run it, then read it honestly
Including the parts that don’t work. A pilot that reports only the good news isn’t worth running.
Content partnership and licensing are also on the table — putting the framework, or Demetrius’s writing, in front of an audience that already has a platform. If that’s the shape of the conversation, say so and we’ll start there instead.
Where the lines are
Four things we won’t do, including for a partner.
- We don’t report a person’s use, content or absence to a facility, program, officer or funder.
- We don’t sell data, and we don’t run ads.
- We don’t produce risk scores, assessments or anything that could be read as one.
- We don’t make Upstream a condition of anything. It stops being useful the moment it’s mandatory.
If this is close to something you’re already trying to solve, let’s talk.
Tell us who you serve and what the gap looks like on your side. A short reply with real detail is more useful than a form.
Working directly with people coming home? The page written for them is here — it’s the one worth sharing.