Established by and for women with lived prison experience, Seeds of Affinity provides social support for women exiting the prison system as well as support to women within prison, ranging from court support and advocacy, to toiletries packages for new prisoners. 

Their on-the-ground work builds power, solidarity, self worth, and a sense of belonging during the difficult transition between prison and the community.

Currently, through a Discovery Grant and in partnership with the University of South Australia, Seeds of Affinity are developing their own chatbot through which women are sharing their lived and living experience to support others in navigating key steps post-release.  

We sat down with Seeds of Affinity Board Chair and UniSA researcher, Dr Michele Jarldorn, for a conversation about Seeds of Affinity, their Discovery work, and their vision to take hold of tech and use it for good.

We hope you’ll spend time getting to know the story of Seeds and their work, in Michele’s own words, below. 

I remember when I first met Linda, Seeds co-founder, she explained the simple premise of how Seeds got started, that women get out of prison but have built these really strong relationships with women still inside and then they get out, and feel lonely and miss the sense of community they felt when in prison. To address this, Seeds started with a shared lunch.  

Initially, Seeds was in the Bowden-Brompton community centre but once they lost ongoing organisational support from the Department of Corrections (DoC) they had to work out how to pay the rent. So Anna, Seeds other co-founder, developed this social enterprise almost by accident, making toiletries to create some income, but what they found was that it gave the women something to contribute to and build together. Even with some errors along the way this was an opportunity to learn about resilience through working out what went wrong and having the power to change things. 

Then as rent increased at Bowden-Brompton and it was looking like they might be forced out Seeds connected with Frances, who had been the Chaplain at the women's prison who found them a space within the Uniting Church at Semaphore. Seeds began using the church twice a week to continue the shared lunches and were given a small space in the office and built some cupboards for the social enterprise and kitchen supplies. 

Since 2016 we’ve been seeking funding for a place of our own and after years of advocacy and grant writing we actually signed the lease on a premises at Kilburn and have just moved in, which we’re so excited about!

What we know is women get out and navigating the system is so hard and so complicated. I've heard it myself from one woman for whom trying to navigate the system had become so frustrating, so disheartening, that she just wanted to return to the prison. 

Anna, our co-founder, worked in correctional services for about forty years until she retired close to 18 months ago. She said a lot of her work in community corrections was helping people navigate systems, yet the assumption from people who don't need social services very much is that it’s all just there for you, all these resources and services. 

We got a little grant through SA Health to promote community responses to suicide prevention. The idea was fairly simple; we would package up the toiletries Seeds make through the social enterprise and included in the packaging we would have contact information for Seeds on the front and basic support services information on the back. The idea was that these could be provided to women as they exit the prison. But, we were left out of the distribution aspect and what we heard was that more often than not, women were getting out of prison without them.

More broadly though, people don’t always want to receive information on printed materials. At an organisation I used to work for we’d hand out six or seven flyers to people on their first visit and inevitably whenever you left the office, you’d see those same flyers in and around the bin! So, printed information wasn’t being used, it wasn’t accessible and frankly no one wants to carry around brochures. Another disadvantage of printed information is that it becomes outdated quickly and it’s impersonal. What I observed was that the women trusted Linda and wanted information from her. 

We were at a board meeting one night looking at applying again for that same grant but discussing how it hadn’t worked how we had hoped. I said wouldn't it be cool if we just had an app where we could control the information ourselves. Which, on reflection, is a pretty silly thing to say given that I rarely use apps myself!

Not long after, I met Susie Emery and together we won some internal seed funding from the University of South Australia which enabled us to create and test the LindaBot prototype which is where we discovered it wasn’t going to be an app but it needed to be a chatbot, named after Linda. 

From there we began the process of creating LindaBot, guided by an advisory group of women with lived experience of incarceration. Everything from the eight key subject areas, to the language and content has been co-designed with FIW including through workshops we ran inside the Adelaide Women’s Prison, where we estimate that we saw over half of the women prison population, close to 70 percent of whom indicated that this was not their first time in prison. The women shared their expertise and experiences of navigating different parts of the system post-release to help support other women facing the same challenges.

 Part of the project was that we wanted to employ women across every single facet, for the tech aspect of the project, that's been hard to achieve and has highlighted women are missing in different fields, or are so underrepresented that they are harder to engage.  

The project itself has become bigger than what we imagined - but there’s scope within the budget to pursue that and we’re not constrained by a predetermined or narrow outcome. We’ve been able to pay a group of women on different contracts along the way which is wonderful, but also complicated because of the complexities of the welfare system. Each contract has been small but the impact is huge. One of the women who has been working on the project with us was looking to reconnect with her daughter post-release and shared with me that her daughter said, “I’m so proud of you mum, look at you, you're working with UniSA”.  

And so there's been these other outcomes that we never expected to see that have been really lovely like an uptick in the number of women coming to Seeds post-release as a result of our presence in the prison doing the co-design.  

It was interesting you know, as an outsider to this community, I’d heard so much about the women not being given a chance and not being listened to, and then there was this point in the project where we had set up a shared workspace for the women to do all of their researching and ideation but it was a really slow start. It felt like they expected someone to be hovering over them saying “do this, do this, do this, in exactly this order and then report back to me” and that's not how I operate. I think it was a very unusual experience for them, and a good learning for me around supporting lived experience experts in paid roles. 

We’d love it if someone read our paper on radical co-design and wanted to talk about what we did. When we presented about the project at an international conference for formerly incarcerated women, one of the women chose to talk about that exact experience, that there was a point at the start where she felt frozen because she wasn’t used to people letting her do a task without watching or micromanaging her and she related that back to being in prison and having her every movement controlled. That part of the project has taught me so much about working with FIW and made me realise how we’ve got to be very gentle with people and that even when giving independence you've still got to guide people towards it and help them know that it's ok. The women have done incredibly well, they’ve created this amazing bank of resources and knowledge, enhanced by their own experiences of navigating systems and have come up with fantastic ideas about how we present the information.

We would love for other organisations to do something similar - to take hold of tech and use it for good. I guess we were really interested in how this work pushed back against tech being used to surveil and control women, it flips the script. Advances in the use of technology will continue to happen at pace, and with that comes the risk of an even bigger divide between people who create it and those who use it – if they have access at all. That’s where we’d like the outcomes of this project to go further than the Seeds community, to get people thinking about how we ensure that tech is accessible and beneficial for all people in the community and not just for those with resources. 

What we’re working towards with LindaBot isn’t exactly transferable to other communities, but the ideas and the method certainly could be. We would be so happy to share what we learned just as we’ve benefited in learning from and with other organisations (shoutout to Flat Out and Sisters Inside!).