Sue Ellen Allen

Activist, Blogger, Brainstormer, Business adviser, Change Agent, Connector, Consultant, Educator/Teacher, Global soul, Idea generator, Writer/Editor

Sue Ellen Allen is an author, speaker, prison expert and ex-inmate who combines leadership with prison and public service. What can these subjects possibly have in common? Everyone falls down. Sue Ellen experienced what many consider the ultimate humiliation: prison and disgrace.  It's what you do after the fall that counts. Sue Ellen knows only two choices: Get back up or Get back up. Her humiliation was a lesson in leadership and gratitude. As co-founder of Gina’s Team, Sue Ellen worked tirelessly to help women in prison prepare to successfully reenter society. Through her unique collaboration with ATHENA International, Sue Ellen was able to bring the ATHENA Leadership Model inside Arizona’s women’s prison with a remarkable success rate. Additionally, Sue Ellen was invited to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative to create a community collaboration to find jobs for Gina's Team program graduates before their release, a unique concept in Arizona and the country. In 2016, Sue Ellen was honored to be a guest of First Lady Michelle Obama in her box for President Obama’s final State of the Union address, representing the 2.3 million women and men behind bars. Her memoir about prison life, The Slumber Party from Hell, is a leader in sparking the conversation about the cost American faces as the world’s ‘Incarceration Nation’ both in tax dollars and in human lives. She was awarded the Dawson Prize in Memoir in the 2009 Prison Writing Contest for PEN American Center. Her writing is included in Serving Productive Time by Tom & Laura Lagana, authors of Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul. Additionally, many of her poems have been published in Cosmopolitan magazine under the direction and mentorship of the late Helen Gurley Brown.

Working with businesses, technology, academia, health care, the faith based community, justice and former felons to "Reinvent Reentry." Prison is an $80 billion business with a 60% failure rate. No successful business in America would be allowed to operate with those numbers and yet we allow the prison business to flourish. As a country, a society, human beings, we must do better.

"Education, not incarceration, is the cheapest form of crime prevention. Education in prison is not a reward, it's a necessity. It’s about preventing more crime & creating safer communities.” 

Leadership, Prison issues, Reentry, Reinvention, Speaking, Writing

Imagine sitting in a prison cell reading an article about TED in Oprah magazine. What I missed desperately (besides my husband, yogurt and tomatoes) was intelligent conversation. Here was an entire organization dedicated to intelligent TED Talks. It sounded like a dream. I saved the article. Fast forward to freedom. Suddenly I was invited to a TEDx. I went and it was all I imagined and more. Now I had a new dream. How could we get TED into prison where I believed people would soak this up like the proverbial sponge? (It's not like the movies, honestly.) Well, the prison world moves slowly but our first TEDxMingusMountain took place in 201 at a juvenile facility for girls in Arizona. It was an incredible day of motivation and inspiration. That's the power of TED. Working with TED in NYC, we created a DVD full of inspirational TED talks for prisons to use in AZ on their in-house cable channel. Unfortunately they weren't interested at the time.

I make delicious candied jalapeños. I believe in magic.