History

Organizational History

MCI Cedar Junction

(Walpole)

In 1977, 30-year-old Lyn Levy spent most of her time working as a volunteer at Walpole State - one of the toughest prisons in Massachusetts and in the country. Ms. Levy worked to assist and support prisoners throughout their process of returning to society. She believed that with the right resources and opportunities, the formerly imprisoned could achieve healthy, productive and meaningful lives by breaking the cycle of addiction and crime. In 1978, Ms. Levy founded Span, Inc. with enough funding to hire one employee.

Within five years, Span expanded in size to include five employees in a two-room office on Boylston Street. In those days staff spent most of the workweek behind the walls of three state prisons, providing inmates with individual counseling and reintegration groups. Some ten years later, the issue of re-entry started to receive national attention as Span began to be recognized for its rehabilitative and reintegration work. Since then Span has received program funding from various state and federal agencies, such as the Department of Public Health (DPH), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Department of Labor (DOL), and the Social Security Administration (SSA).

Today, Lyn Levy and several of Span’s first employees continue to commit themselves to re-entry and reintegration as they work side by side with a staff that has grown to 45-plus employees. Span has developed from a fledgling agency that once provided discharge planning to only one prison community, to an organization that now serves all state and county prisons. Today, Span operates a 2.7 million dollar budget and is the longest-running Boston-based provider of services dedicated to prisoners and ex-prisoners.

Lyn Levy