Program helps children of incarcerated parents

NEW ALBANY, Ind. (AP) - Every Tuesday, 9-year-old Savannah Landgraf knows exactly what she'll share with her classmates when it's time for weekly "celebrations." Each student writes down what most excited them about their week and puts it in a pot to be pulled out and announced. Savannah's celebrations aren't big trips or new gifts or even the latest video she uploaded to YouTube. Instead, she celebrates My Club.

"I like hanging out with my people," Savannah explained. "And Suzanna is really fun, she's my mentor. And I like to play and meet new people and to discover new things that I don't know about God."

Apart from their enthusiasm for their weekly meetings at St. John United Presbyterian Church, Savannah's My Club "peeps," all have something in common: They all have one or both parents who are either incarcerated or who have been incarcerated in the past.

The youth group is just one of the mentoring programs offered by New Albany-based Christian Formation Ministries, and it's also the newest program. The ministry's founders, the Rev. Richard Johnson and his wife, Rev. Dawn Johnson, have been working in prison ministry and mentoring adults for roughly 20 years.

For the first 10 years, the couple and their children traveled North America in a trailer, visiting inmates in prison where they would preach and extend a helping hand. They stopped in 38 different states and three Canadian provinces. Then after nearly a decade, the couple decided to settle back down in Southern Indiana.

"We felt led to take all the things that we had learned traveling around all these different prisons and residential re-entry programs for people coming out of prison and start to build it here," Richard Johnson said. "So that's what we did. We came home, we bought a house in Jeffersonville and started Christian Formation Ministries as a brand new organization."

They started out by building ministry teams that would visit Floyd and Clark County jails every Sunday to teach life skills, something the ministry still does. Johnson also started visiting the Indiana Department of Correction's Henryville prison where he still visits once or twice a week.

If recently released offenders want to continue what they started with Johnson and other ministry mentors while incarcerated, they can meet with them every Monday at St. John United Presbyterian Church. That's exactly what Savannah's mom, Wendy Landgraf did.

Landgraf spent seven months in the Floyd County jail for shoplifting nearly four years ago. Every Sunday, she and other female inmates met with Christian Formation Ministries mentors. That's where she met her mentor, Gina.

"She prayed with me and she just showed me the way to go," Landgraf said. "She said when you get out of jail call this number and you can continue coming down to the program, and that's what I did."

Landgraf has been a part of the ministry's Successful Re-Entry Program, or SURE, ever since. She said through faith-based mentoring, she learned that her urge to shoplift was a coping mechanism. Once she was able to get to the root of the problem, that urge went away. Unlike so many others, Landgraf has been able to stay out of jail ever since. She said she continues going to meetings to be with the "family I love so much."

FAMILY OF MENTORS

About six months ago, the ministry extended that family by starting My Club for children of inmates or recently-released offenders. Johnson said the idea to mentor children has been on his mind since he founded Christian Formation Ministries. It was his daughter, the Rev. Suzanna Jacobson, who inspired the ministry to finally put ideas into motion.

"It started for me personally probably a few years ago," Jacobson remembered. "I was watching a children's program and it had a special about what happens when a parent goes to jail. ... It kind of shocked me that there's this thing that's happening in our communities that's so big that a national children's program has to put together a special program for it.

"And I thought, this is something we can fix."

Jacobson sees My Club as a way to break a cycle that so often hits children of inmates. Those children, her father said, are much more likely than other children to end up in the criminal justice system. He explained that mentoring adults is about "triage," while mentoring their children is a matter of prevention. And if mentors can reach the children, the positive effects of that can branch out to the rest of the family, he said.

According to a 2011/2012 National Survey of Children's Health conducted by the Data Resource Center for Child and Adolescent Health, Indiana ranked second in most children who has at least one parent who has been incarcerated. The survey showed that more than 11 percent of Indiana children were in the same situation as the My Club kids are today.

My Club kids and SURE program adults typically meet in separate rooms for about an hour every Monday. For the kids, the room looks like a club headquarters, from the drawings pinned on the walls to the big couches the kids sink into. Sometimes special guests will come and teach the kids something new. Learning from guests speakers is one of 11-year-old Ally Landgraf's favorite parts.

"There was this one person that came from the Philippines and they talked, they just showed you knew things and stuff," Ally said. "And then there was the art people and they taught us new things about art. They talked about like colors and drawing and stuff, and see that castle over there? I drew that."

Ally talked about her love for the club as another girl played with her hair, interrupting her thoughts and sending giggles throughout the room. Without knowing, someone looking in might think My Club is like any other after-school program. Jacobson said that on the first day of My Club, she intentionally avoided telling the kids why they were there. She didn't want to label them or make them feel different.

But when Jacobson started sharing her own family's story of prison ministry, the kids' hands shot up and they suddenly wanted to tell their own stories. Soon, they all realized they had something in common: their parent or parents had spent time away from home and in jail.

That might be one of the reasons the kids trust each other and trust the club.

"It's just, it's somewhere I can go to share my feelings, and like, I can just share out," Ally said.

Landgraf said her time in jail was hard on her daughters. They knew where she was and they knew it was bad, she said. Landgraf doesn't talk about her time in jail much anymore, instead focusing on the future. One day, she may even be able to help another mother or father who finds themselves in jail.

"Just to give back because they did it for me and I'd like to be able to do that for someone else," she said.

Jacobson said My Club hopes to turn kids into future mentors, too. Ally and Savannah aren't sure if they want be mentors, but they might already be. They just don't know it.

"I help people get happy," Savannah said. "I cheer them up sometimes."

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Source: News and Tribune, http://bit.ly/1Zq8H2t

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Information from: News and Tribune, Jeffersonville, Ind., http://www.newsandtribune.com