If you're anything like me, lately you've experienced strong feelings of anger, sadness, frustration, and just plain helplessness. I’ve spent the last few weeks listening, learning, and searching for something – ANYTHING – I could possibly do to offer some measure of support to those who are particularly vulnerable and heartbroken.
Many of you already know that I have a deep passion for serving my community through prison fellowship. At Christmastime in 2018, I told you about the women at Atlanta’s Metro Transitional Center who were in desperate need of basic personal care items. I asked for your help in gathering those items so that we could present them to the women as Christmas gifts, and WOW did you ever come through!! For about a week or so, I came home from work each day to mounds of Amazon boxes at my door. It was so overwhelming (in the best possible way) that I felt the need to put a sign on my door so that the Amazon delivery personnel would know the part they were playing in serving the MTC women. That whole experience was such a joy, and there’s no way it would have or could have happened without YOU.
Once again, I am coming to you today to ask for your help in serving the women of Metro Transitional Center. Living at MTC is a privilege that these women have earned. They work so hard in preparing for their release by participating in personal and professional development as well as a work release program. COVID-19 hit this community of women especially hard. Not only did they have an outbreak of the virus within the facility, but the work release program was suspended to help minimize the spread. Like many others across the US and the world, the only source of income for these women was abruptly cut off through no fault of their own, and the progress they were making toward their release came to a screeching halt.
In addition to the devastating impact of COVID-19, a disproportionate number of the residents at MTC are women of color. They are hurting and scared by what is happening in the communities that they will soon rejoin. Chaplain Sandra Anderson is doing everything she can to serve their personal, emotional, and spiritual needs with the very limited resources available to her. Along with a list of very modest and basic items that she is collecting, Chaplain Anderson expressed a desire to provide journals to each of the women. She wants to give them an outlet to express their thoughts, feelings, fears, and plans for how they will make their own communities a better place when they are allowed to return to them.
This is where you come in!
I have set up an Amazon wish list to collect journals for the women of MTC. If you feel led to do so, just click on the link below to purchase a basic black notebook (or several!) which can then be shipped directly to me. As I receive your donations, I will personally deliver them to Metro Transitional Center myself.
If you have been asking yourself, “What can I do?...How can I help?” – here is your answer. You can do THIS. You can show these women that…
They have not been forgotten.
They are loved.
THEIR. LIVES. MATTER.
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