Spiritual Direction
For 37 years, Restoring Connections’ Formation Program for Spiritual Directors emphasized a commitment to spiritual direction services and retreat services for people in poverty, in prison, in shelters, and in group homes. With nearly 30 years of serving people who struggle with significant trauma and who often suffer from mental illness and addiction, Restoring Connections provides service opportunities for spiritual directors in the prison setting, with women in re-entry, with people who are homeless, families in transition, and soul care for everyone.
Soul Care for Individuals in Prison and Re-Entry
Restoring Connections has offered Soul Care for individuals in prison and during re-entry since 2001. We regularly serve around 100 people per year. Soul Care focuses on the deeper reasons why a person ended up in the criminal justice system. It helps each person address the trauma they have experienced, develop self-management skills for when they feel triggered and assume responsibility for the harm they have caused.
Elder Wisdom
Elder Wisdom equipped seniors for transformative presence and meaningful service with others. Serving individuals nearing or in retirement, programs focused on the spirituality of aging and the gifts that elders bring to the community.
Making Choices
Women in prison and during re-entry are among the most neglected members of our society. For 20 years, Restoring Connections responded to their needs with Making Choices, a mentoring program that fostered the development of decision-making and life skills.
Volunteer mentors were business and professional women who received training and ongoing support in their important coaching role with women who were incarcerated or recently released. Beyond basic decision-making skills, the Making Choices program encouraged personal responsibility, stronger families, social engagement, and leadership development. Mentors and former offenders worked together on public education programs and advocacy efforts. The impact of Making Choices is demonstrated in the 92% of graduates who have re-entered the community successfully, as gainfully employed and contributing members of society.
Between 1980 and 2018, Colorado’s prison population grew 604% while the population of the state grew 59%. The Department of Corrections budget increased from $70 million in 1985 to $703 million. Currently 45 people a day are admitted to prison in Colorado. Sixty-five percent of incarcerated women are mothers of children under 18.
This reality has drastic effects on the next generation. Children of incarcerated women are 5-6 times more likely to become incarcerated than other children who live in poverty but whose mothers were never incarcerated.
Making Choices made a difference:
Since its beginning in August 1999, Making Choices mentored more than 700 women.
Nearly 90% of the women who completed Making Choices successfully re-entered society, remained crime free and became contributing citizens.
Without Making Choices, only 48% of women offenders successfully re-enter society.
It costs Colorado taxpayers over $40,000 per year to incarcerate one woman.
It cost Restoring Connections $1,400 to mentor one woman.
Given our success rate, Making Choices saved Colorado taxpayers over $1 million each year.
Making Choices volunteers assisted the mothers of more than 2,500 children in making the effective changes necessary to provide stable homes, making it less likely that their children will end up in prison in the future.