Heidi Goodwin is the Community Support & Outreach Coordinator of the Washington Innocence Project. Following her years of providing tremendous peer support to WashIP’s Freed Family, Heidi joined Washington Innocence Project in 2021 to lead its client re-entry efforts through her lived experience. In 2014, Heidi was released from the Washington Corrections Center for Women after spending nearly a decade wrongfully convicted.
While incarcerated, Heidi chose to engage with a local community of women within the walls of the prison who were thriving despite the harsh environment. Together, Heidi and these 10 other women developed, and implemented, a program called The Women’s Village. The Village was created to harness the unique passions and strengths that each individual woman leaned on to endure their time in prison and to turn those values into resources that could be shared with the rest of the women living within the institution. The program provided an outlet and incentive to get women involved with the things that mattered the most to them and succeeded in changing the existing violent culture in the prison.
Heidi founded and led the Family Support Sub-Council of The Women’s Village from 2011 to 2014. Heidi serves on the exoneree advisory board for both Exonerated Nation and Healing Justice where she has been trained in rigorous peer support and restorative justice skills. Additionally, she sits on numerous national Innocence Network steering committees that guide decisions and policies and serves as an Innocent Network Conference Ambassador, a program she helped to conceive and develop for The Innocence Network.
