Nicole Steward

“I’ve always helped others.” Nicole Steward is a self-described jack of all trades whose jobs have ranged from real estate agent to hairdresser, insurance agent to photographer. But no matter what her profession’s been at any given moment, Nicole has always made time to lend a hand to those around her. At a high school in southern Michigan, where Nicole has lived since she was in high school herself, she ran an outreach program in which she mentored teenage girls. At her church, she runs a women’s ministry. For the past several years, she’s also been working at Oaklawn, a provider of mental health and addiction services in Indiana. Initially, she facilitated support networks for families in need there. Now, her work focuses on men who have committed domestic violence and children who have experienced it.

Helping others runs in Nicole’s family. Her mother spent many years working as a substance abuse counselor, and Nicole remembers how she would come home and tell Nicole about her therapy groups. Now that she’s become a counselor, Nicole says, “I call her and I tell her stories from my groups. My mom still works, so she still has group. So we go back and forth talking about the different groups.”

Now, the impulse to help others has shown up in the next generation of Nicole’s family. Her son, Jordan Johnson, who’s currently incarcerated in a state prison in Michigan, has told her when he gets out he wants to be a motivational speaker. She sees that future for him as “promising” because of the way Jordan has applied himself on the inside. “He’s read, like, 40 books since he’s been in there,” Nicole says. “Not little 100-page books. I’m talking thick books, you know? So he’s gaining knowledge and more information so when he does come out, he’ll be able to help others.”

Level has become a valuable part of Jordan’s efforts to gain knowledge. In the first six months since Nicole enrolled him in the program, he’s completed four guides: How To Start Your Own Business: Prepare To Launch; How To Start Your Own Business: Thrive In The First Year; How The Internet Works; and Computer Science Without A Computer Volume 1. What really appeals to Nicole about the program is the way it’s helping Jordan. She says, “It’s helping to expand his mind, it’s helping him to grow. And helping him to level up – and I’m saying level up in the sense of going to the next level, like, ‘You have your high school diploma, now what? You’ll come out of where you’re at, but what are you gonna do when you come out?’ That’s what I appreciate with you guys.”

Level is also helping Jordan help others before he gets out. Nicole says that when she first discovered the program, “I thought that it was good because I was, like, ‘Okay, if I knew or he knew of somebody else in there, maybe he could share what you guys were offering and they would be able to do the same thing he was doing.’” She knows that he’s talked about Level to people in the facility with him, because they’ve asked him what he’s doing with the program’s guides and where he got them. “Jordan can tell different people in there,” Nicole says. “They may not even know it, but thanks to his mom, who looked into it and paid for him to do it, now he can pay it forward, maybe not in cash but in knowledge to help somebody else.”

That help in the form of knowledge is having a profound impact on the people who are incarcerated. Nicole believes Level is “reaching out to a population where people kind of shut them down. People don’t realize you guys are helping in such a way that – You have no clue. I can’t. It’s unexplainable. I’m gonna have to be honest. Because in there, they don’t get everything that we’re able to get out here, so for them to be able to even learn how to be an entrepreneur or learn how to do the different things that you guys offer is phenomenal.”