Prison Ministries With Women
Barbara Gifford, Director
P.O. Box 1911
Decatur, Ga. 30031
(404) 622-4314

She didn't realize it at the time, but an odd coincidence more than a decade ago created the circumstance that led Barbara Gifford into her life's work and inspired her to create this unusual and effective program.

Working as a resident volunteer at the Open Door Community Shelter, a non-profit organization that provided a prison ministry, Gifford was asked to take charge of a monthly caravan that provided transportation and support to families going to visit relatives who were inmates at the Hardwick Women's Prison near Milledgeville, GA. At about the same time, a woman named Emma, who'd been sentenced to life in prison at age 16 for a murder that she didn't commit, wrote a lawyer in South Carolina asking for help getting out of prison. The lawyer passed it on to an Atlanta lawyer, who routed it in turn to the shelter, where officials asked Gifford if she'd like to correspond with the woman.

On Gifford's first trip to Hardwick, she met Emma -- a confrontation that she now admits made her very nervous. "I didn't know what we'd talk about," she recalled. "I was unnerved that I might have to stay in the meeting room for two hours with someone I didn't know and wouldn't know what to say to."

In fact, the women hit it off instantly. Gifford quickly learned her new friend's story -- how as a 15-year-old she had witnessed the man she called her common-law husband kill a man, then helped dispose of the body in a woods and fled with him to Florida . . . and later was advised to skip a jury trial and plead guilty, with the understanding that she would be given probation. Instead, she was tried as an adult and sentenced to life imprisonment.

"We talked and talked," Gifford recalled. "I was so surprised when they told me it was time to go. We were two people becoming friends. It was extraordinary -- mind-boggling -- I don't remember to this day how I got from the prison gate to the van, it was just a religious experience, I KNEW God had called me to work with women in prison. That was it, and I never lost it."

Gifford quickly started looking for ways to carry out this new commitment. She started a support group for women at Hardwick, billing it as a "prayer meeting" to satisfy the suspicious prison authorities, making a four-hour round trip every Friday night for a year and a half in borrowed cars to talk with up to 20 women about everything from the Bible to their hopes and dreams. Working with lawyers, legislators and a host of supporters, they finally got Emma out of jail. And during the period, she became painfully aware how many women, once released, quickly returned under new sentences, having failed to make the transition back to life on the outside. "Why? They couldn't get jobs, they couldn't pay the rent, so they went back on the street and started all over again," she said. "It was a vicious circle. There was absolutely no support for women who got out of prison."

First, she started looking for money to open a house for women just out of prison, and found it -- after two or three years -- from the Presbyterian Women of the Church, who provided a $95,000 grant, sufficient to buy and renovate a five-bedroom house in Southwest Atlanta, which opened in 1989 as the Elizabeth Fry House, named after a 19th century English Quaker woman who was one of the first prison reformers. Incorporating as a non-profit, Prison Ministries With Women added other support services, ranging from a clothes closet and source of starting household goods and furniture to counseling, information and referral for women just out of prison. In 1991, the group opened a second house, a duplex in Southeast Atlanta, purchased from a bank for $500 and renamed Sojourner Truth House. Residents in both houses -- primarily recruited from the state's transitional work-release programs for women inmates -- pay modest rent ($175 and $200 per month, respectively), making these houses financially self-supporting. Prison Ministries With Women, Inc. (continued)

In addition to providing a safe, affordable living environment and essential support services for newly released female ex-offenders, Prison Ministries soon realized something more was needed: A training program leading toward good, skilled jobs. Staff efforts to work with the Private Industry Council and similar groups proved frustrating, because the P.I.C., restricted by tough government performance quotas, was reluctant to place ex-offenders or women with limited skills.

So, pulling together volunteers and donations, the group rounded up eight IBM-type computers, printers and software for just $3,600, and started teaching computer skills. The course quickly evolved into a series of three-month "modules" involving three-hour classes three days a week, in which women start by learning basic typing and computer literacy, then go on to advanced training in computer programs like WordPerfect and Lotus that are in considerable demand by area employers. A recent addition, a "job readiness" module, works to build job-seeking, interview and self-esteem that seem to be as critical as the actual computer training in moving the women into full-time jobs. Although the group hasn't kept close records of job placement and retention for its graduates, the staff is learning that women who've been in prison need support as well as skills to translate training into paying jobs.

And now they've come up with a new idea, Project Venture Forth, a notion still gestating but that celebrated a milestone in early February when it incorporated as a profit-making corporation, Skyline Office Services. A group of about 8 women, most of whom have been through the computer training course, joined as equal shareholders in an independent computer-services company, in which they'll sell computer services such as accounting, book-keeping and word-processing on the open market, seeking an unfilled niche by providing those services evenings and weekends at first, gradually expanding into full-day operation. They'll lease computers and office space from Prison Ministries at first, but by plowing all profits back into the corporation, they hope to grow quickly and provide many more jobs for more women.

With a staff of just three and a budget of $120,000, Prison Ministries is taking on a major challenge, but the combination of residential support, job training and growing its own business to hire trainees may just turn into a "bootstraps" operation that works.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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