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GOING SOMEWHERE?
FFLIC Travel
Help support the Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children while booking your next trip!!! FFLIC is proud to give you another way to help improve the lives of those affected by the juvenile justice system while saving you money simultaneously! FFLIC now has its own travel site – which finds the most affordable airfares, car rental fees, and hotel stays while raising us money!!! Our site is powered by Travelocity and there is no additional cost to you. So next time you travel, visit us at FFLIC Travel and book a trip. For every dollar you spend, FFLIC receives a portion – and its not because we’ve added it to your bill! It’s the corporation that gives a percentage of their earnings. So plan a trip today through FFLIC Travel
FFLIC MEETS MOVIE STARS
By: Gina Womack
Hosted by the North Star Fund and actors Patricia Clarkson and David Strathairn on February 5, 2007, New York City was the scene for a fundraiser for FFLIC and Safe Streets/Strong Communities. I was so excited to be in New York and be among people that care about our issues, kids and families as well as what is going on in New Orleans. Grace Bauer was humble and articulate as she told her story of what brought her to FFLIC and so many other families.
"LIFT UPS, NOT LOCK UPS"
In the rebuilding of New Orleans
A donor briefing and fundraising to aid grassroots efforts to rebuild the gulf region
Join actors Patricia Clarkson and David Strathairn, and North Star Fund donors David Rosenmiller and Merry Tucker in support of Familes and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) and Safe Streets - Strong Communities.
In the rebuilding of New Orleans
A donor briefing and fundraising to aid grassroots efforts to rebuild the gulf region
Join actors Patricia Clarkson and David Strathairn, and North Star Fund donors David Rosenmiller and Merry Tucker in support of Familes and Friends of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC) and Safe Streets - Strong Communities.
To see an article about this event, please follow this link:
www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-gross/nola-in-nyc-north-star-_b_40578.html
FFLIC and Safe Streets are still accepting donations for this event. If you would like to make a donation, please click this link and in the memo state: FFLIC NYC Fundraisier.
To donate immediately please use the following link. JJPL will accept donations on our behalf.
Next story...
Stopping The Madness
By: Grace Bauer
The Beginning
Incarceration is not the Answer
But what would have made a difference? What if we would have taken a little piece of that 100 billion and invested it in evidence proven community based services that would have allowed this boy to stay at home with his family? The research shows us that the boy would have stood a much better chance of not ending up in an adult prison. Our community could have provided the mental health and grief counseling, so desperately needed by this boy, if we had not spent so much building and operating prisons. Decades of research have given our country the tools we need to help young people succeed but we continue to allow politicians to use the public safety card to scare us into using good tax dollars to fund expensive and ineffective prisons. Prisons do not buy us the public safety we all crave! Prisons take money from the very resources that would reduce the crime rates, such as education, housing, health care and sustainable economic development. These resources are much more effective in reducing crime than all the expensive prisons we are building and maintaining today! Today that boy, now 20, sits in adult prison waiting out his three-year sentence for breaking into a coke machine while on probation. Do I believe what he did was wrong? Of course I do! Do I believe the answer is locking him up for three years? Absolutely not! This boy is fortunate in some ways, he can read and write and he has a tremendous amount of support waiting for him on the outside. He will also walk out of prison with three felony convictions, no job skills and an expensive restitution bill to pay. He is unlikely to gain any job skills on the inside and will stand a poor chance of employment with three felony convictions. What are his chances of making it? Statistics tell us that only 33 of every hundred convicted of a crime will be successful once they re-enter society. Odds are he will be back in prison before he reaches 22.
Years ago, I met a juvenile justice attorney who used to work on cases where people were sentenced by the state to die. I asked him how it was that he came to work in the juvenile justice field? He told me he had represented men on Louisiana’s death row for a long time and he learned a lot about these men and their lives before prison. The reason he wanted to help children was that all of these men had been raised by the state of Louisiana in a juvenile prison. He felt there was something terribly wrong with a state that raised children to be violent and dangerous and then in return put them to death for what they (the state) taught them. The words that attorney said to me that day, almost seven years ago, are with me everyday as I go about my work of improving the juvenile justice system and our communities. The young man is not alone; today in the US, over 2 million people are behind bars. We must take action to stop the mass incarceration of our young people. As a community we should stand up and fight for justice and resources to keep our young people in their own communities where they can receive the help they need. We must come together, to demand that local decision makers put our tax dollars into the resources that will make a difference, good economic opportunities, quality education and healthcare for all people. And the young man I met on August 8, 1986…He waits for a day when he will be released and can start over. As his mother, I wait for the day when I can hold him atarms length, look him over and then hold him tight once more.
Next Story...
FFLIC'S CIRCLE OF CARE
We are not sure what was expected from that e-mail, but we could have never guessed that we would receive the extremely generous outpour of support that came to FFLIC from across the world. We received letters, donations and supplies from as far as Japan that would help FFLIC set-up a new office in Lake Charles and give desperately needed monetary support to our membership after first hurricane Katrina and Many members called us crying after receiving their checks because they were able to purchase much needed clothes or food or pay for rent. We helped move one member from Houston back to the Metropolitan area. We helped another member relocate to Colorado. We assisted one member to get new glasses, and helped a young woman who was pregnant and incarcerated when the storm hit with funds for baby clothes, diapers and bottles. We cannot begin to thank all of those people from around the country that thought enough of FFLIC and our members to send donations. We thank you for helping us help so many families at a time that our government would not.
• "Our thoughts & prayers are with you and we send along a mantra we like from a street mural in Upper Manhattan”: “Lose not courage. Lose not faith. Move Forward.” Lauren & Edward
• "Bless you for the work you are doing. Keep it up!" Bob & Judy
• "You all are amazing! A friend of mine wrote this check & I'm sending it along. I’m spreading the word to as many people as possible. Take good care of yourselves & each other.” Natasha
• "It is with a loving heart that I send this letter and check. Watching the tragedy of the hurricane expand far beyond property and into the lives of many has been deeply saddening. I know this check is not enough and as a congregation we are struggling to commit ourselves to being part of an accountable movement to
tear down all systems of racism and classism that hold this country up. Please accept this check as a small part of our commitment to justice. I hope to send more as we do other fundraising. Please feel free to ask for specific donations and I will see what I can gather from the community I serve and the
communities we are all apart. Yours in faithful solidarity,” Jason, Community Church of Boston.
• "Thanks for your commitment and hard work"…excerpts from letters we received.
then hurricane Rita. After receiving donations, FFLIC staff made contact with all members in the affected areas to determine their
needs, which varied greatly, and helped where we could. This process would become known to us as the Circle of Care, because we had so many people lending helping hands to help us heal broken hearts. In our offices, we have a circle of hands listing the names of the people that gave donations and where they are located, and inside the circle of hands we have the names of our members that received donations on red hearts. Most of our members lost everything, so we tried to give them enough to help start rebuilding their lives. Other members needed appliances, gas cards and help getting back and forth to New Orleans to take care of their homes. One member said when she got her money “Oh Thank you Lord, I can go and see my children for the holidays...because they have been evacuated all over and I haven’t seen them since the floods.”

