advocacy and my first trip to prison

I was in high school when my aunt from NYC drove me to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison for women located in New York State. I was about to make my first trip into a prison to meet Karen Marie White, a young woman who I had been writing letters to for a few years. Karen had run away from home as a teenager after being sexually abused by her stepfather. On the run and looking for food and shelter, she ended up in prostitution and was imprisoned after one of her clients ended up dead. Karen's story had somehow made the NY Times, and my Aunt LuDean read it and began to write Karen. She got me involved in writing Karen, and by the time I was a junior in high school I had written the governor of NY asking for clemency for Karen. Karen was an amazing young woman....gifted bigtime as an artist and poet and very intelligent. She rocked my stereotype of prisoners who were behind bars for murder.

I write this because I've been thinking a bit lately about advocacy. My aunt showed me what advocacy looked like. She wrote letters for 1o1 causes, and she was often found advocating for some of her clients (she was a child psychiatrist). I'd go to her apt. in NYC, and she'd have newspaper clippings all over the place and would passionately draw me into believing that the causes she was advocating for were indeed the most important causes in the world. I remember feeling at age 17 like I was living in a little cave back in Iowa completely unaware of the world until I was around her.

Though LuDean most definitely had lasting influence on me (she died when I was 21), my sense of advocacy has not been naturally strong. I grew up with a compassionate, outreaching mom who was (and is) full of mercy ministry. Together, I'd follow her into county home visits, meals on wheels, visiting shut-in's from church. My mom and her sister, LuDean, were very different in personality. My mom, Lois, would lean on peacemaking and quietly serving, and my aunt might be seen as a "trouble-maker", rocking the status quo and always living in a passionate state.

For most of my adult years, I have leaned on the serving side without getting myself too involved in systems or root causes. Maybe there's been a part of me that's been lazy...maybe I didn't want to be a rebel-rouser or be different from the norm....maybe I wanted to control how much I serve or allow to disrupt my comfortable life. Whatever the reason, I've had some very good advocacy models move back into my life over the past several years in my adult life. I'm grateful for their witness and for the challenge it brings me to go beyond "standing with" people in compassion to "standing up" and "standing in the gap" for people in advocacy.

What has been your history, your learnings, your experience with advocacy?

advocacy: the act of pleading for, supporting, or recommending; active espousal