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But now he wants to smile more, he says.

“When I look at the future, I see me being in church, I see my family, I see a prosperous future,” he explains. “I trust that God is going to finish what he started in my life. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. It can be a simple life. I just know that there are better days ahead.”

Conley eventually hopes to own his own company, he says.

Fields, who at 6-feet-9 poses as an intimidating figure, learned a lot about teamwork from playing high school and college basketball, and he often falls back on that experience to guide his interactions with his colleagues.

2S Industries operates like a team, Fields says. They hold each other accountable, challenge each other and support each other through life’s ups and downs. It hasn’t been perfect. Over the years some of them have gone back to prison. Jones’ friend, Steven Douglas, was shot and killed by Dallas police back in 2014. (The case is awaiting review by a grand jury.)

They work like a family Fields says. “When somebody’s down, we come and pick them up. If you’re going 50 percent one day, somebody else has to make that up. We’re a team.”

Although Fields grew up with a single mom who struggled financially and often relied on food programs, he recognizes the stark contrast between the kind of poverty he experienced as a child and the kind of poverty and environment that drove the guys on his team to crime at young ages.

“I would never compare my experience to theirs,” he says. “Although I lived on a lower rung — I didn’t have nice clothes or nice shoes, my mom didn’t have a nice car — I had a mom and grandparents and neighbors who had the same right to discipline me as my parents. Truly a village helped raise me. Look at their village.”

It was dozens of little things, like his mom helping him with driver’s ed, that made the biggest di erences in Fields’ life.

That’s why it’s such a big deal that at 28-years-old Jones now owns a house, has worked hard to clean up his criminal record

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Join us in celebrating all things ‘Mother’during the month of May! Sign up on our mailing list to find out about upcoming events, classes, and promotions. www.makersconnect.org or call 972-803-8890 and even has a driver’s license — unlike most of the men his age in West Dallas. Where he was once a figure in the criminal underbelly of West Dallas, he’s now a pillar in the community.

“He always has at least two or three guys sleeping in his house,” Fields points out. “Ahommed [Jones] is the guy people go to when they’re at rock bottom because they know he’ll take them in, but he’ll also expect them to start working, so he’ll bring them along to what we’re doing.”

Except Fields, everyone on the team has some kind of criminal record. Even the project manager, Martin Evans, just got o parole after “making a series of bad choices” that lead to him falsifying financial documents.

But he insists going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to him because it forced him to change his life and eventually led him to prison ministry and 2S Industries.

“Now I’m working with men who need a chance,” Evans says.

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