Green Streets not only keeps recyclable and compostable materials from ending up in landfills, but it also saves its employees from living a life of crime and incarceration.

At the age of 13, Tyrone Mullins had his first contact with the justice system in 1998, handcuffed for starting a small tussle at school. He could’ve been hit with serving a few weeks of detention or even a suspension, but instead, he was formally charged with a crime — setting Mullins on a path of near-permanent incarceration for the next half of his life. “From that point on, it was juvenile hall, county jail and prison,” says Mullins, a San Francisco native who grew up in a Western Addition public housing project.

Navigating past numerous hard knocks, in 2010, Mullins co-founded a successful business that provides jobs to public housing residents, regardless of their parole status.

The difficulties that Green Streets’s employees encounter are considered a badge of honor, a sign of how much they’ve overcome to reach their current success — meager as a minimum-wage job might look to any of the Bay Area’s elites. When Mullins finished his two years in prison, he enrolled in Project ReMADE, a 12-week program at Stanford that trains ex-cons to be entrepreneurs. “I see the transformation I’ve made, and I’m honest with myself,” Mullins says today. “I continue to be a work in progress.”

For the entire story written by Chris Peak, please click here