Community Highlight: The HEPI Initiative

Violence prevention is a community effort, achievable by taking many tiny steps together. Oftentimes, those involved in the work are so busy taking tiny steps, they forget to look up and realize how far they’ve come.

We would like to take some time to look up from our tiny steps and see the great work being done in our very own communities. This month, we are highlighting WVU HEPI, which is West Virginia University’s Higher Education in Prison Initiative. HEPI provides educational opportunities for people in prison and aims to expand on the opportunities available to those incarcerated, among a host of other things. According to their 2025 Annual Report, HEPI now offers an associate degree program with a 60-credit-hour curriculum, with 13 in-person classes. This is an incredible achievement when you consider that a decade ago, people in prison often struggled to even get their hands on a book.

We have been focused this month on education as a form of violence prevention, and HEPI exemplifies that for us. Incarceration strips people of their dignity and choice and removes them from opportunities for self-improvement. By providing people opportunities to receive an education within prison, HEPI isn’t just teaching them about math or literature or history – they are providing an avenue to rebuild personal dignity and self-worth, to invest in a future worth imagining, worth living. Education builds connected communities, and connected communities provide protective factors against violence.

As you can read on the WVU Center for Prison Education and Research website, WVU HEPI was born out of a decades-long relationship between West Virginia University and the Appalachian Prison Book Project (APBP). What isn’t as clear on the website is that the founding director of HEPI, Dr. Katy Ryan, also founded APBP.

While APBP and HEPI are both made up of dynamic communities committed to the belief in education as a human right, it is so because Dr. Katy Ryan envisioned and worked and inspired it into being. Not to discredit the work of the literal horde of kind and creative people who have worked alongside Dr. Ryan to see this project come to light, but rather, to highlight the impact one person can make. Dr. Katy Ryan is just one person, and yet, she has inspired and mobilized decades of students and colleagues into this work through education and compassion and a great deal of patience.

The advocates at RDVIC would like to thank Dr. Katy Ryan, Dr. Rayna Momen, and everyone else at WVU HEPI who are working to improve educational access for people in the carceral system. We see the important, impactful work you are doing and appreciate you.