What We're Building and Why We're Starting Here

We launched Fresh Start Network after running into the same barrier again and again: people who were legally eligible for expungement but had no practical way to access it.

The laws exist and the eligibility is there, yet fewer than 10% of eligible people ever complete the process. The people who need this most, the ones who have been waiting years or sometimes decades to clear a record that no longer reflects who they are, still can't get through.

Not because the system won't allow it. Because no one built the on-ramp to the system.

We're a founding-stage organization and we want to be honest about what that means. We don't have a fleet of clinics running yet. We don't have a decade of outcomes data to point to. What we have is a clear diagnosis of the problem, a design for the solution, and the conviction that this is one of the most underfunded, high-return interventions in the workforce development space.

Here's what we're building.

The Access Fund covers court filing fees, document retrieval costs, and legal support so eligible individuals can complete the expungement process without paying out of pocket. Fee waiver programs exist in some jurisdictions, but they're inconsistent and largely unknown. We're making the cost of expungement zero, full stop.

Direct Relief Clinics are mobile, community-embedded expungement events that bring the process to people rather than expecting people to navigate the system alone. Not information tables. End-to-end guided experiences where someone walks in eligible and leaves with a filing complete.

Implementation Partnerships mean working directly with courts, public defenders, reentry organizations, and employers to build the filing pipelines and court data systems that allow expungement petitions to move through the process efficiently and at scale. This is where individual case support becomes structural change.

We're based in Washington, D.C., which was a deliberate choice. Over the past several years, policymakers have increasingly shifted from debating whether expungement laws should exist to figuring out how to implement them at scale. We want to be close to those conversations and the federal funding streams that are starting to follow.

If you're reading this as a potential partner, funder, or collaborator: the people who come in now get to help shape how this grows.

We'll keep writing these updates as we build. The work deserves to be documented honestly, not just celebrated after the fact.