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Community Small Groups
Free-world groups give men a place to walk through the work before they ever serve inside.
Why This Exists
Become
before you
build.
Richard A. ChaconFounder and Executive Director
I served two terms in Arizona prisons.
During those years, I watched countless men walk out the gate only to return months later. The system blamed the men. The men blamed the system.
But from where I stood, the problem was deeper.
The world moves fast, and most of us were never taught how it works. We weren’t taught money. We weren’t taught leadership. We weren’t taught responsibility, ownership, or how to build a future worth protecting.
So while I was incarcerated, I became obsessed with learning. I studied business, personal finance, entrepreneurship, leadership, and anything else that could help me build a different life. Eventually, I began teaching those lessons to other incarcerated men as a peer facilitator, helping prepare them for the realities waiting beyond the prison walls.
When I was released, I put those lessons to work.
Together, my family and I built a successful business. For the first time in my life, I had something I was proud of. I had earned respect. I had created opportunities. I had proven that a man with a record could succeed.
Then everything changed.
COVID hit, and the business collapsed.
What I thought was the loss of a company turned out to be something much deeper. I had unknowingly built my identity around what I had created instead of who I had become. When the business disappeared, so did my sense of worth.
That season made me sit with a question I’d been running from since prison:
Who are you when everything you’ve built is gone?
As I rebuilt my life, I went back through every lesson that had helped me create success in the first place. Underneath the strategies, tactics, and business plans, I found a single principle that had always been there:
Character precedes capital.
People do not invest in ideas. They invest in people.
Before anyone trusts you with their money, opportunities, relationships, reputation, or influence, they first have to trust your character.
Success is rarely a capital problem. It is almost always a conviction problem.
That realization became the foundation for everything that followed.
And it is why I created The Conviction Curriculum® — a framework designed to help men build the character, discipline, leadership, and personal conviction required to create lasting success in every area of life.
Because the goal isn’t simply to stay out of prison.
The goal is to become the kind of man who can be trusted with freedom.
