Good News

As soon as they walk in the door, the students make a beeline for their knitting projects.  Once they start knitting a pleasant calm falls over the room as the students settle into their work.

These results would speak for themselves in any institution, but when the students are minimum security prisoners–and male prisoners at that–the life changing impact is nothing short of inspiring.  In fact, they now have prisoners putting peer pressure on other prisoners to go to knitting class!!  Watch as co-founders Lynn Zwerling and Sheila Rovelstad recount their 5-year journey to making “Knitting Behind Bars” a reality:

NEW BLOG:

Interested in issues related to prison and faith?  Check out our new inspiring and thought-provoking blog, “Inside Faith” written by a prisoner who is rediscovering his faith while behind bars.

If you had to work 5-10 times harder than your competitors to accomplish a task, how would you fare? Richelle Zampella must face that exact question everyday as she prepares to compete in the National Spelling Bee. The 11-year-old from Oklahoma is blind which means she has to study by reading Braille. Her teachers say that it takes her 5-10 minutes to read a list of words that her sighted competitors could read in a minute.

She has been learning to read and write in Braille since she was five and her teacher, Cindy Lumpkin, had this to say about her amazing accomplishments, “When I had her in kindergarten, by the end of the year she was reading on a second grade level — in Braille — and it just takes a lot to learn Braille.”