Through seven seasons of Orange Is The New Black, the Netflix original became much more than just a show about one woman who has questionable taste in romantic partners. Though Taylor Schilling’s Piper Chapman was the focal point of the show’s early seasons, the streaming show became about far more than just one woman’s struggle with incarceration.
As the show’s scope expanded to the plight of the other inmates and how they ended up in prison, fans developed their favorite characters and grew attached. Which is why losing those characters, even after seven seasons, was hard for many fans when the final season of the show hit Netflix in late July.
One of the more emotional losses was that of Poussey Williams, who (spoilers incoming) is among those who have a heartbreaking fate. In the show, a fund is established in her name to raise money for those who have also ended up in trouble with the law, and as it turns out the show has decided to make that more than just a storyline in the show.
Netflix announced that the fund is real on Thursday night that the Poussey Washington Foundation is real in an emotional video that included video testimonials from fans who shared how the series impacted them in real life. Some stars of the show then surprised these fans and embraced them, which was touching.
The real change, however, comes by the way of a real fund, which will donate to eight charities that are working on prison reform, women’s justice and other show-adjacent issues:
Poussey Washington may have been a fictional character created for television, but her life’s story and devastating fate is all too real for many women in this country.
The Poussey Washington Fund will support eight preexisting non-profits to benefit organizations focused on social issues surrounding criminal justice and policy reform, immigrants’ rights and helping those affected by mass incarceration.
The Orange Is The New Black creative team created the fund to support organizations in their effort to rethink, revise and reform justice in America.
According to the fund’s CrowdRise campaign page, it will donate to A New Way of Life, Anti Recidivism Coalition, College Community Fellowship, Freedom For Immigrants, Immigrant Defenders Law Center, National Council for the Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Woman and Girls, the unPrison Project, and the Women’s Prison Association. It’s a really interesting move by the show’s creators and a way to make lasting change out of a series that saw its final episodes unfold on streaming services, making it certain that it won’t just be an empty plot point on a TV show.
