Kristal is the CEO of Bridging the Gap Transportation, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia that provides bus transportation for families visiting incarcerated relatives at state prisons. Having grown up in a family with an incarcerated father, Kristal used her first-hand knowledge of the unique challenges in order to launch her own company.
Transcript
Hi my name is Kristal Bush and I am the CEO of Bridging the Gap Transportation. So Bridging the Gap is a prison van service that reunites family, here in Philadelphia, to upstate Pennsylvania prisons. So, anyone who has a loved one that's serving some sort of prison time, Bridging the Gap is that van service that reunites them. My father was incarcerated for 25 years, my brother was incarcerated for 12, my other brother was in and out of prison, so all the men in my family were incarcerated and I was already going up to visit them, I just started telling them, that hey, I got a van, and let's carpool, and it turned into one family then two families, and now, here to date, I've served over 3500 families from Philadelphia. I do door-to-door service, just with my father being incarcerated I realized one of the issues were just younger children, older women just meeting at 30th and Market, or just early in the morning, and I didn't like that. It was, you know, a safety issue, so I decided to start a service as door-to-door service. So we pick people up directly from their house, and then we just ride up to the prisons. So if it's 14 people, 14 different stops, then we're doing that. And normally, when a person will call, when they call our phone, they'll tell us which prison they wanted to go to, we'll schedule a date. If it's a child that's riding, we'll allow them to know that we do allow children 10 and under to ride our service for free. And then once they are on the van, we have snacks for them to eat because it's normally trips between two to five hours away. So we're on the road for a long time, going to upstate Pennsylvania. Right so, like I told you, I started, I got my first van with my refund check, but then from there, it's just the families are paying, and then I take a lot of donations. So along with Bridging the Gap, I've founded a non-profit which is called Strengthening Families by Bridging the Gap so I get donations on that, and I get donations from like, just different people who just want to donate, I file for different grants that just allow the children to ride for free, but we use the non-profit to get like different donations and things like that, but other than that, it's actually the families that support and that's paying.
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