Fair Shake Founder and Director

Sue Kastensen founded Fair Shake in 2009 and is currently the executive director. She created Sun Dog Hemp Body Care in 1993, which is now owned by Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. She graduated from Walden III, an alternative High School in Racine, WI, and 26 years later received her bachelor’s degree in Individualized Learning from Viterbo University in La Crosse, WI. In 2019, Sue received her Masters of Education from Rutgers University.  She is a member of the Correctional Educators Association and, in 2015, received the distinguished Ralph Kaplan Memorial Award for Dedication to Technological Advancement in Correctional Education Settings. She has been invited to the White House twice: in 2015, for her use of technology within a prison setting and again in 2016, as a Champion of Change for Expanding Fair Chance Opportunities. She serves her community by participating in both the Planning Commission and the Variance Committee for the City of Westby. She envisioned and developed Fair World Project in 2008. Sue is the former board chair for MOSA, an organic certification agency; former board chair for the Domestic Fair Trade Association and former board chair for the Viroqua Food Coop in Viroqua, Wisconsin.

Sue had no experience working in a prison setting and is now considered a reentry expert. She travels around the country in her ‘bubble truck’ to talk about Fair Shake: she shares what she’s built so far, and learns from folks in state and federal prisons so she can make Fair Shake better and better.

About Fair Shake

Fair Shake is focused on the most important resource for reentry success: the person coming home.

To this end, we provide free resources and information to incarcerated people, formerly incarcerated people, their friends and families and other vital reentry stakeholders.

Prisons focus on safety and security. They do not offer lists of current resources and rely on outside organizations to provide this information. Many prisons allow private organizations (e.g. schools, religious organizations, and entrepreneurship programs) to come in and reach their target audiences via a variety of structured programming. But programming does not provide the freedom of self-directed exploration, and it does not reach everyone.

Incarcerated people are no different from the rest of us; all adults want to search, review, and decide for ourselves which resources will be the most beneficial for the trajectory that we would like our lives to take. We want to see how things connect to prioritize our goals. And we want the freedom to look around – without being subject to someone else’s agenda – so we can reflect, weigh our values, commitments and options, and own our decisions.

By providing resources, curated websites, educational manuals and interactive tools Fair Shake provides our incarcerated and formerly incarcerated neighbors with access to the resources and information they need to carve out their own unique path to successful re-entry.  We actively maintain these ever-changing resources and give them to state and federal prisons free of charge. For the past 10 years, more than 200 state and federal prisons have been sharing Fair Shake’s information on their websites and with those incarcerated in their institutions. In fact, many institutions have one or more copies of our 200-page “Reentry Ownership Manual,” our guide to supportive re-entry resources, in the prison library.