My Nonprofit Reviews

I’ve been volunteering with Truth be Told for about two years now. I teach a curriculum designed for a jail setting where there is a lot of turnover. The women aren’t with us long enough to go through a full curriculum and graduate so we do what we can while the women are in class.

When friends and family ask how I feel about the women, I tell them I feel great compassion for them. Some wonder about this compassion, after all, these women have allegedly committed crimes, but I look at if differently. I think we should ask ourselves if we would have done any better if we had grown up in the same conditions as these women. Instead of looking down on them we should remind ourselves that most volunteers have not experienced the amount of sexual assault, rejection, violence, or seen the heavy drug use that they have. Consider for a moment that many were innocent children who have been through hell and had nowhere to turn but to drugs or to people who led them into crime. This is where my compassion comes from.

For compassion to become transformation we must step into these uncomfortable relationships where there is great suffering. Maybe the time we take to listen and provide some tools will make the difference for just one person in the class. What a gift it would be to that person and the world.

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