Our Work
What We Do
Since our founding in 2017, The Insight Alliance has addressed critical challenges in our community, inspiring meaningful and lasting change.
We explore the mind, build emotional strength, and foster well-being in Oregon’s most vulnerable populations, like prisons or facing reentry after incarceration, to help them rebuild their lives with hope, resilience, and purpose. Through programs like Insight to Wellbeing, peer mentorship, resource navigation, and emergency funding, we support 475 adults and youth annually, helping them break cycles of trauma, incarceration, and addiction.
The Insight Alliance’s work is based on the principle that “people who feel better, do better,” and our participants become more solutions-oriented and have an increased belief in themselves and their futures. Our program helps people understand their feelings as information about where their mind is moment to moment, rather than something they need to fix or find relief by causing harm to themselves or others. As they gain insight and learn more about the nature of the mind, participants gain awareness and then old habits fall away naturally and sustainably.
The strength we bring to this work is our neutral approach that supports healing and transformation for all community members, regardless of who they are or where they come from.
We know the most powerful agent of change in any community is the minds of the people living in it. No living being is in isolation and the health of all our minds affects the systems that guide our society. Thoughts can (and do) change, therefore experience can also change.
Our approach of helping people to understand how thought systems work opens up endless possibilities for connection and understanding. If we can change minds, we can also change our communities and address the myriad of complex issues we face - from the opioid epidemic to mass incarceration.
Our Mission
We empower individuals, organizations, and communities to rediscover their resilience and potential through transformative programs focused on healing, growth, and systemic change.
Our Vision
Our vision is to cultivate kinder, stronger and more equitable communities propelled by individuals leading healthy, prison-free lives.
The Insight Alliance develops and administers a series of programs inside Oregon Correctional facilities & in the community that foster innate health realization based on the understanding of the Three Principles.
Our Founders Story
In 2015, Anna Debenham went to prison. Her route to the Big House had nothing to do with crime. In a lifelong search for lasting peace of mind, Anna came across a groundbreaking approach to life and work that had her excited to learn more. While working as a business coach in London, Anna went back to school for a 10-month program at the One Thought Institute in London.
While at One Thought, Anna began volunteering with Beyond Recovery, an organization that had received a government grant to research the impact of sharing the 3 Principles with the prison population. Anna joined Beyond Recovery as a volunteer assistant, teaching this understanding in prison in the UK. For the first time, she saw how this approach could change the lives of others. After one year with Beyond Recovery, Anna and her husband moved back to Portland where she remained determined to maintain a focus on serving the prison population. In September 2016, she began working in prison in Oregon at the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI). Her programs were well received by the staff and participants alike, and grew exponentially as more and more people were positively impacted and would spread the word.
Anna knew she needed to make this work official and focus all her time and energy on what she loved – working with the incarcerated population. After a successful meeting at Coffee Creek women’s prison, Susan Stoltenberg – Executive Director of the YWCA - offered to be the organization’s fiscal sponsor. From there, The Insight Alliance was born, growing its footprint in multiple facilities in Oregon. In 2019, the organization became its own 501c3 nonprofit organization.