Almost 2.5 million kids in the US have a parent who is in prison. So who steps in to fill the void? With any luck, it’s you.
“For children who experience other kinds of separation from their parents, there’s some level of sympathy. The children of incarcerated parents don’t get that. They’re also serving time,” said Sharon Content, the founder of Children of Promise, NYC, a three-year-old organization committed to doing everything it can to make sure that the children of incarcerated parents don’t end up behind bars themselves.
An after-school program and summer day camp in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn are focused on developing the children’s social, academic and leadership skills to ensure that they’ve got opportunities for success. It’s the first program of its kind in New York City and it currently serves 135 kids from ages 6 to 18, including the cute ones in the photo above.
The kids come for the arts and crafts, but they leave having worked with the organization’s licensed clinical social workers in one-on-one or group therapy or in therapeutic art or drama programs.
“Seventy percent of the children of incarcerated parents repeat the cycle if there’s not any intervention,” Content said. “Our program was designed to break that cycle.” It also exposes kids to peers in similar circumstances, minus the stigma.
The organization is always in need of volunteers, both to spend time with the children on homework and recreation and to work on designing the website, creating brochures, doing the accounting, hosting fund-raisers and more. Contributing could be as simple as wrapping some of the 150 gifts Children of Promise, NYC will hand out at its upcoming Christmas party.
It is also always looking for people to serve as mentors to young people ages 10 to 18 through its career-based Project DREAM. Mentors could find themselves hanging out with students like 10-year-old Pedro, whose mother is in jail. “It’s really hard to love someone who everyone says is bad,” he said recently. He had been getting into fights at school but blossomed in group counseling when he was told that we can still care about someone who made a bad decision.
These kids don’t have to be “the next generation of inmates,” Content says. To find out more, visit childrenofpromisenyc.org.
Photo courtesy of Children of Promise, NYC.
