Why help?

I’m reading the year-end pitches for last-minute contributions by prisoner advocacy agencies and prison ministries. We can’t compete with that stuff!

We cannot boast of major new programs launched, major legislative accomplishments, numbers of souls won to Christ. The accomplishments of HUMANITY FOR PRISONERS are small and insignificant to many. Except to those who’ve felt our touch.

Let’s face it, these are not headline stories that would have any success in a year-end pitch for last minute gifts---

-Helping an inmate get into a Christian college program
-Holding the hand of a frustrated Muslim woman
-Delivering hundreds of pounds of free yarn to prisons for crochet classes
-Persuading a major defense lawyer to take a wrongful conviction case pro bono
-Finding a sponsor for the immigrant/wife of a prisoner
-Speaking at Public Hearings for deserving inmates
-Getting traffic fines paid so a mother can again visit sons in prison
-Pressuring the state to properly treat a cancer patient
-Finding clothing for a new parolee
-Helping 150 inmates to properly file commutation applications.

In fact, some of the news in 2017 was even negative.

-An Assistant Attorney General chastised me in a Public Hearing for writing a critical blog
-A Prison Warden who despises HFP refused to allow me to speak in a prison assembly
-An MDOC employee “accidentally” tripped a switch cutting off all of our email correspondence to 1,500 prisoners.

Well, if you’re still reading, be assured that this is right where our team wants to be: down in the trenches, getting our hands dirty, doing everything we can to help Michigan prisoners on an individual basis when they don’t know where to turn. I call it “Jesus work.”

We have no sensational pitch. Yet, I can think of no other agency where your financial contribution touches a life so intimately, so dramatically.

Just one day left in 2017. Please consider a gift.

Be assured that hundreds of needy Michigan prisoners join us in thanking you.

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