Damany Fisher
Damany Fisher, Ph.D., Director of Ecosystem Development
Damany M. Fisher, Ph.D. is a talent and workforce development specialist based in Middletown, Delaware. He is a graduate of the University of California, Davis with a B.A. degree in History, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Fisher’s passion is helping people access training and resources to develop skills and competencies that lead to meaningful, family-sustaining careers.
Damany has a background in corrections education and reentry and served as the inaugural Director of the Rising Scholars program at Solano Community College in Fairfield, California. In this role, he oversaw academic and career training programs inside California State Prison Solano, the Correctional Medical Facility, and the Solano County Jail. In addition, Damany partnered with the Solano County Workforce Development Board and Division of Adult Parole Operations (DAPO) to strengthen linkages between the state workforce and corrections systems in order to improve labor market outcomes for justice-involved individuals. In 2019, he co-founded the program, Students Overcoming Adversity and Recidivism (S.O.A.R.), which provides mentorship to formerly incarcerated students and connects them with college and community resources so they can achieve their educational, personal, and career goals. From 2020 to 2022, he served as Regional Director of Special Projects for the Bay Area Community College Consortium. In this role, he worked to align the needs of employers with the programs and curricula of colleges to ensure that students learn in-demand skills.
Dr. Fisher is currently focused on developing career pathways for the justice-involved population. With an ever tightening labor market, it remains imperative that employers expand their candidate pool to include talent with records. In addition to addressing the talent needs of employers, Fair Chance hiring offers a commonsense approach to reducing recidivism and increasing public safety. To support businesses in taking crucial steps into meaningfully including talent with records in the workforce, in 2022 Dr. Fisher co-founded More Than Our Worst, which offers internal staff training and coaching, partnership development, Reentry Simulations, and culture shifting.
Ian Harriman
Ian Harriman, Director of economic development
Ian has spent the last 10 years building businesses with an earned expertise where technology and social impact meet. Ian has helped technology companies raise hundreds of millions of dollars in Venture Capital while taking these companies from ideation to successful exit, and as a child of justice-involved parents, Ian has centered employment for the formerly incarcerated as one of the primary challenges for his generation to solve. He has successfully positioned technology products as the tools to help eradicate the barriers that he’s seen his family and others face.
Outside of personal success in entrepreneurship, breaking into Sales from an untraditional background, and championing social impact projects, Ian’s contributions to the background check industry may be the biggest professional mark he’s made thus far in his career. From championing the practice of hiring talent with records during a time when the concept was looked at with open hostility, to designing job matching solutions that pairs talent with employers who will accept their specific charges, to utilizing HR Technology to enable mass job opportunity creation for people with criminal records, Ian has had a heavy hand in fundamentally turning the background check industry on it’s axis and pointing it in the direction of a fairer future.
Ian began mentoring new entrepreneurs, as well as entrepreneurs with criminal records, to understand and work through the systems that limit the growth of their ventures in 2019. By 2022, Ian took that initial vision and folded it into a collaborative project by co-founding More Than Our Worst. As the Director of Capital Deployment at MTOW, Ian brings his diverse experience in technology, entrepreneurship, mentorship, and lived experience navigating the justice system into strategic efforts that MTOW clients are pursuing.
Rehana Lerandeau
Rehana Lerandeau, Director of Employer Development
Rehana Lerandeau, a skilled capacity builder and community organizer, has nurtured a lifelong commitment to social justice into powerful work experience and a proven ability to champion change. Rehana specializes in the ecosystem of fair chance hiring with a core focus on developing the ability of employers to successfully hire, retain, and nurture the careers of talent with criminal records. During her time at Checkr Inc, a mission focused background screening organization, Rehana developed the organization's first internal hiring program for talent with records. This program achieved a 5% representation of talent with records in the full time employee base, and is recognized by many as the gold standard hiring practice for fair chance talent. The talent hired in Rehana’s program boasted a 100% engagement, 98% retention, and 78% promotion rate. Prior to leaving Checkr to co-found MTOW, Rehana was critical to the development of Checkr’s Fair Assessment curriculum for employers, was the primary author of Checkr’s Fair Chance Playbook, and supported opening up access to work for over two million justice-involved workers through various customer engagement projects.
At MTOW, Rehana advances employer efforts to promote an equitable future for talent with records by providing case-by-case training packages for employers. As an expert consultant, Rehana is continuing to lead in her field and support building opportunities for meaningful, life-affirming access to work for talent with criminal records. Through her efforts at MTOW, Rehana played a leading role in developing the nationally recognized employer development curriculum launched by Dave’s Killer Bread Foundation (now housed under Jobs for the Future), which has trained dozens of employers nationwide. Currently, Rehana and the MTOW team are supporting ESO Ventures inaugural Reentry Entrepreneurship Cohort as well as working with the Community College of Rhode Island to launch a multi-year statewide effort to radically shift the employment landscape in the state for fair chance talent.