The Plus Program sewing crew at New Castle Correctional Facility recently made 900 custom designer bags for the Life Stream Organization. The mission of Life Stream is “to improve the quality of life for people at risk of losing their independence.” One outreach program of Life Stream is to provide comfort and care to foster kids as they transition throughout the foster care system. The New Castle Plus Program sewing crew came alongside the Life Stream initiative to make a difference in the lives of foster kids.
It is the little things in life that matters most. Simply receiving an empty designer bag to help a child move their few belongings, instead of a trash bag, can fill a child with so much hope, love, and a sense of belonging. Mr. Gaunt, a Plus participant, has experienced the foster care system first hand. He says that when he was in the system he did not have anything really to call his own. In addition, when moving, no one helped him move from home to home. Emotional and physical abuse was something to which he had become accustomed. He told me he was given a trash bag to put his belongings in to help him move. I asked him how this made him feel. “I felt as if someone was tossing me away with the trash,” were his words back to me. Many foster kids struggle with low self-esteem and the feeling of being unwanted by their parents, society, and each foster home they moved in and out of, can scar a child emotionally for life. Mr. Gaunt told me if he had one of the designer bags that the Plus program is making for Life Stream, he would have felt as though he had something to cherish and to call his own. What a difference an empty bag can make when given with love and care!
Give and it will be given back to you. The Plus participants who gave of their time, talent and hard work, also benefited from the process of making these bags for foster kids.
One participant stated, “I personally was humbled. I was able to do something for someone else other than myself. Once, I was a very selfish person. But now it makes me feel great to be able to make something whereby others are benefiting from it.”
Another participant said, “It gave me a sense of pride of helping someone when they are in need. So many people help us out who are incarcerated, and it’s good to be able to give back.”
Not only were the lives of foster kids positively impacted forever from a gift as simple as a designer bag; the Plus participants who had the opportunity to make these bags, were positively impacted, too.
Life Stream is only one of many organizations that benefit from the service the Plus program offers the community. PLUS stands for Purposeful-Living-Unit-Serve. Service is what we would call our bread and butter. We take pride in being able to give back to our community through serving. COVID-19 placed an unexpected challenge before the men in the Plus program at New Castle. As we sought to keep our tradition to give non-perishable food items to God’s Grain Bin, limitations and supply shortages on food made this difficult. It would have been easy to begin to concentrate on our own needs and well-being during this time, but PLUS teaches the principle of generosity. This is to carefully manage one’s resources so one can freely give to those in need. With this in mind, PLUS was able to overcome the challenges placed upon us and gave 33 boxes of food to the God’s Grain Bin organization. Helping others who are in need is the crux of our community service, and we are proud to be able to help in so many different ways.
