ALLIANCE
Credible connection
She knows how fear, shame, loyalty, and unfamiliar systems look from the participant’s side.
Founder and author
Takisha
“Tai” Jernagin
Takisha “Tai” Jernagin is the founder of Homegirl Alliance and the author of Homegirl. She does not teach course correction from a slide deck. She lived the decisions, the sentence, the return, and the work of building again.
The road here
Her record is part of the story. It is not the whole story.
Takisha was born in Pasadena in 1977 and grew up in Los Angeles and West Covina. She joined a set at thirteen, became a mother at seventeen, danced for years, and used drugs to stay numb. She served four years and nine months in federal custody for aiding and abetting an armed bank robbery, in which her role was lookout.
She came home to a halfway house with a job notice pinned to the wall and followed it to a Work Source Center. She fought her way through college systems nobody had explained to her and earned three degrees: an AS in Alcohol and Drug Counseling and an AA in Communication Studies from Mt. San Antonio College, and a BS in Organizational Communication from Cal Poly Pomona, where Project Rebound supported her.
She went on to facilitate classes, prepare people for release, mentor young people, build community partnerships, and work inside institutions that often fail the people they say they serve.
Three degrees, one door at a time
Not knowing the system did not mean she lacked ability.
Nobody handed her the hidden curriculum: the forms, the deadlines, the vocabulary, the offices that send you to other offices. She learned it the long way, and now she teaches it on purpose.
From the book
“My record is still there, but it does not tell the whole story of my life.”
Homegirl is a memoir of survival, responsibility, faith, reentry, and the women usually left at the edge of somebody else’s gang story.
What she brings
Lived experience, education, and time inside the system.
Institutional translation
She can help staff see the hidden curriculum in their forms, policies, handoffs, and expectations.
Practical movement
Every conversation returns to the next reachable action and who is responsible for it.
The next chapter
The memoir tells where the questions came from.
Homegirl Alliance turns those questions into a curriculum other women, young people, peer leaders, and institutions can use.
Read the 12 Moves