Destigmatizing Parental Incarceration
Ava Martoma ’25, who has lived the experience, and her nonprofit aim to foster resilience among children facing adversity.
Her story might surprise you, and Ava Martoma ’25 is fine with that.
“There’s a stigma around having an incarcerated parent, and we want to say, ‘This is common. You’re not alone, and you have a community to support you,’” Martoma said. “I’ve found the courage to talk about this issue because I didn’t want anyone else to go through what I did.”
Martoma’s personal experience with parental incarceration informs her commitment to this cause and compelled her, along with her brothers David and Joshua, to establish KidsMates Inc., a nonprofit organization whose core focus is to foster resilience among children facing this sort of adversity.
“Parental incarceration is a silent American epidemic. It’s more common than childhood asthma in America, and yet we still don’t talk about it,” Martoma explained. “I had to navigate this process entirely by myself, because there were no resources out there to guide me. I needed to change that.”
Now, Martoma and her brothers have been recognized for their good work with $15,000 in seed funding as a grand-prize winner in the 2023 Changemaker Challenge. The competition, sponsored by T-Mobile, the T-Mobile Foundation, and Ashoka, seeks initiatives driving positive change. KidsMates was selected as the “Equity in Action” category winner and received the funding to support its efforts to facilitate communication between incarcerated parents and their families, as well as advance its advocacy work.
KidsMates began by aiming to provide books in prison family-visiting areas, where bored young children can easily find trouble, Martoma explained. Seeking to donate them, she was initially refused by prison officials, who insisted that donations must come from a nonprofit organization.
“So, we formed a nonprofit,” said Martoma, who added that through November 2023, KidsMates had expanded its book project to reach 23 out of 36 states in the United States with federal prisons.
When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted prison visiting arrangements, KidsMates redirected its efforts toward state and national legislative and advocacy work. Its endeavors contributed to the adoption of the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022, which requires the Federal Communications Commission to ensure reasonable charges for inmates’ electronic communications with individuals outside the institution. The bipartisan bill was signed into law by President Biden in 2023, and several states have begun making such communications free.
“Communication is the foundation of bonding with an incarcerated parent – or a parent in general,” Martoma explained. Her rationale resonated with the Changemaker Challenge judges.
“In our pitch, we talked about how [T-Mobile] was uniquely positioned as a telecommunications company to help with our goal of free communications or finding different opportunities for families to stay connected,” she said.
Martoma hopes that KidsMates’ efforts will empower children to “own the label of parental incarceration instead of letting it own them.”
“We want every single kid to know that their identity is so much more than having a parent who is in prison” she said. “Their identity is filled with the things that they love, their hobbies, the things they enjoy, rather than ‘your dad is in jail, your mom is in jail.’”