Reaching, Reconciling and Restoring Lives

Preventing at risk children from turning to gangs, drugs, and other crimes is one of the most important factors in making our communities safe and productive for our children in the future. By encouraging change from within, our programs squarely meet the need to reduce recidivism and lessen the burden that offenders and their families place on society. Our current programs are: Behind the Walls, Reentry Life Plan, Three Days with God, Angel Tree, One Day with God Camp,Ezekiel’s Room, Committed Fathers Connected, End of Life, Caregivers’ Day of Hope and the operation of the  Forgiven Ministry Family Center. Forgiven Ministry, Inc. is actively engaged to break this cycle of crime in inmates’ children.  Through our “One Day with God” camps, children of incarcerated parents are shown love, support from our trained mentors and have interaction with other children like themselves.  Statistically speaking, 83% of children with an incarcerated parent actually end up in prison themselves.  Reaching, reconciling and restoring these lives is our goal here at Forgiven Ministry. If we fail to meet the children’s needs, they will inevitably turn to drugs, gangs or other destructive avenues in an effort to fill the feelings of emptiness and worthlessness inside themselves.  Feelings of anger, bitterness, etc. must be released in a safe, nurturing environment. At the same time, our goal is to enable these children and their families to replace those destructive feelings and emotions with constructive ones such as pride and confidence in their ability to become a productive and vital part of the communities in which they live.  We offer hope and love where hopelessness and despair seem to prevail and self worth is practically non-existent.  Our "One Day with God" camp programs are designed to reach, reconcile, and restore families.  More information about our other programs can be found at our website: www.forgivenministry.org. Forgiven Ministry was able to do 5 camps in 2004.  . Our software then was outdated and had little reliability. Forms, documents, training manuals, and presentation packets were all produced through long hours on using antiquated programs and by hand. As of now in 2009, 30 such camps have been scheduled.  These camps would serve approximately 750 inmates, 1500 children and 550 caregivers. Approximately 3,000 trained volunteers would be needed. These camps would not be possible without the use of Microsoft Office.

With the use of Microsoft Office, our productivity has increased by these proportions and all with the same office staffing. "Office" has enabled us to do the following:

 Medical and photography consent forms, Presentation booklets that detail and illustrate every step of a camp from the beginning 3 months before to the camp itself and the follow-up, Training of volunteers (4,500 just recently), Powerpoint presentations  to train volunteers and area coordinators, Development and distribution of training manuals, Inmate parenting programs such as “Committed Fathers Connected”, Posters  & Powerpoint presentations for introducing the camps and for fundraising, Database of volunteers and  Inmates and their families, Structuring of camp costs, Emailing of camp related info to prisons , Importing and exporting of camp related photos, records, etc. Developing area group distribution email lists of volunteers, Creating and producing “Toolkits for Volunteers.”

We believe that our organization has changed and redirected many lives that were once viewed as hopeless. We want to continue this goal and need support from Microsoft & TechSoup  to optimize our effectiveness in implementing camps as well as other programs of our ministry.