Podcast: Getting Ahead – The high-octane fuel in Bridges initiatives

Phil DeVol moderates a panel of users of Getting Ahead

Thank you everyone for joining us today. Our purpose is to describe the Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-By World series and to bring in speakers who are using these versions of Getting Ahead.

I’m really quite excited to be able to pass this on to the people who are using the work. Just by way of background, the origin of this was with Ruby Payne’s book A Framework for Understanding Poverty. I began working with a group of people who were in poverty, and that ended up with the book Getting Ahead in a Just Gettin’-By World. And now there’s a series of these books, and that’s what today is about.

The first of the series was Investigations into Economic Class in America, which I wrote with Karla Krodel from Youngstown State University, and it’s for first-generation, low-income college students.

Then I was compelled to write Getting Ahead While Getting Out, which is for reentry from prison, and my coauthors there are Michelle Wood, who’s a returned citizen, and Mitch Libster, who is an attorney.

The next in the series is Getting Ahead in the Workplace. And that is obviously for people who are actually low-wage employees or people in workforce development and preparing to go to work.

The last book is Facilitator Notes for Getting Ahead. What we have going on across the country is that there are now people certified as facilitators for Getting Ahead, and that sets them up to become certified for the reentry book and the workplace book. Certification is an important part of this because it has to do with model fidelity.

Listen to the podcast for more.

About the Author: Philip DeVol

Phil DeVol is an international consultant who has been working with aha! Process since 1997. He used aha! Process concepts to make institutional changes at the addiction treatment center where he was the executive director for 19 years. During this time he also co-wrote Bridges Out of Poverty with Ruby Payne and Terie Dreussi-Smith. His book Getting Ahead in a Just-Gettin’-by-World is being used to engage people in poverty in the work of building communities where everyone can live well. It worked so well that DeVol used it as a basis for a prison reentry model called Getting Ahead while Getting Out. He works with community leaders to help them move quickly from an attraction to application of Bridges concepts. Getting Ahead and Bridges are being used in hundreds of communities in the U.S., as well as a number of sites in Canada, Australia, Ireland, Scotland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. His books have been translated into Spanish, Slovak, and Czech.