On bookshelves across the country, there are stories about mice and cookies, princesses with long hair and a very hungry caterpillar.
But in Arkansas, thousands of children won’t curl up with a parent in bed and listen to a bedtime story. Instead, they’ll listen to a recording of a family member reading them a story. That’s because 16% of children in Arkansas currently or previously have had a parent or guardian incarcerated — the highest percentage in the nation.
“Families serve a shared sentence with their incarcerated loved ones, so we’re trying to ease, if not break, that cycle,” Denise Chai, the director of outreach for The Storybook Project of Arkansas, told NationSwell.
The Storybook Project of Arkansas saw a place to bridge the gap in both literacy and family connection for children with incarcerated family members. Four times a year, the nonprofit brings books, tape recorders and volunteers into five of Arkansas’ correctional facilities.
There, individuals can record a message and read a book for their family members. Grandmothers will read stories to their grandchildren, fathers will read to their daughters and uncles have the chance to read to their nephews.
“It’s a little piece of the parent at home with them,” Chai said.
In 2019, The Storybook Project of Arkansas reached 1,793 children. The children ranged from infants to high schoolers, and the readers have included aunts, grandmothers and older siblings.
Keeping a connection with incarcerated family members can be a challenge. Prisons aren’t designed for children, and it can cost families time and money to visit facilities. Meanwhile, video conferences and phone calls can quickly become a financial burden on families.
But with Storybook, the parents can partake in their children’s’ lives.
“For the person who’s reading to their children, it’s an opportunity to parent their kids, to play a role in their children’s lives, to be present when they’re not really present,” Chai said. “As they are reading a book to their children, it’s an opportunity to be a good role model.”
Additionally, that continued connection can be one of the keys to success after prison. Studies show that when released individuals have family support, social integration is easier and they’re more likely to find a job and financial stability. A study published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography found that incarcerated individuals who remained in contact with their family throughout were less likely to reconvict.
Jan Schmittou is one volunteer behind the audio recorder. Schmittou, who has served as a volunteer for over a year, has watched fathers moved to tears and listened to mothers read their favorite fairytales to their children.
Schmittou’s first visit was to the Wrightsville Unit. Schmittou went through the metal detectors, heavy doors and walked through the cement facility.
“Once you get past all of that, the reality is the people there aren’t too much different from you or I,” she told NationSwell.
The nonprofit was launched 21 years ago by founder Pat Oplinger and a few volunteers. It worked with incarcerated individuals in two correctional facilities until 2019, when it expanded to three more.
Chai said that expansion is part of an effort to deepen the work they’re doing. Beyond working in more facilities, the nonprofit has started motivating individuals to “do a little more emotional homework” by sharing more impactful lessons and words of encouragement with their children, Chai said. Most recently, they incorporated a bookmark program where family members can create a bookmark to send to their children.
“We’re a really simple program but we’re always trying to do just a little bit more with what we do and have a little bit more impact,” she said.
The Storybook Project of Arkansas isn’t the only organization to adopt this idea. Groups, like the Women’s Storybook Project of Texas and The Seattle Public Library’s Read to Me Program, have similar goals of keeping families connected.
“It’s such a reassuring and loving message about how much they’re cared for and missed even though the person is physically absent from their lives,” Chai said.
More: For Prisoners, Reading Is so Much More Than a Pastime — It’s a Way to Change Their Lives
Tag: Arkansas
These Arkansas Police Officers Play Wingman to an Elderly Man on a Mission
The hard truth about Alzheimer’s is that the disease can cruelly wipe a patient’s memories away. For Doris Amrine, that’s the exact scenario she faces each day as she slowly loses the person she’s known and loved for more than 60 years: Her husband Melvyn.
But as you can see in the CBS News report below, even if Melvyn can’t remember all the details of their life together, his love for his wife isn’t just about the memories. It’s an instinct.
This past Mother’s Day, unbeknownst to anyone else, the Little Rock, Arkansas man set out on a mission — to buy flowers for his wife, something he’s done every year since Doris gave birth to their first child. When his family noticed he was missing, they called the police. The officers soon found him wandering two miles from home.
MORE: Meet a Couple Whose Service to Veterans Will Make You Smile
Even though he requires assistance to walk, Melvyn was “adamant” about buying the flowers, Sgt. Brian Grigsby and Officer Troy Dillard said. So instead of taking him home, the officers went beyond the call of duty and took him to a store to purchase a bouquet. One officer even covered the difference when Melvyn came up short at the cash register.
“We had to get them,” Grigsby told CBS. “I didn’t have a choice.”
The incredible gesture clearly made the desired impact. “When I saw him waking up with those flowers in hand, it just about broke my heart because I thought ‘Oh he went there to get me flowers because he loves me,'” Doris said.
This longtime couple proves that loves conquers all.
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Sustainable Furniture Company Puts Veterans to Work
What’s more all-American than serving your country in the Armed Forces? Well, for one, furniture that’s made in America by U.S. veterans.
As more young servicemen return home in search of work, the Arkansas-based company EcoVet is tapping into the veteran workforce to create all-American, sustainable furniture.
The company, which launched in 2011, trains former service members to design and create high-end furniture out of reclaimed materials from old semi-trailers — typically from Walmart — that are destined for landfills. Rather than adding to trash heaps, EcoVet strips materials from trailers like oak or maple floors to create custom-made items like an Adirondack chair, which retails for $850. The company also donates other parts such as plywood to the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity and tires to automobile shops.
EcoVet has trained and hired 28 veterans since its inception and aims to employ 500 over the next three years. Focusing on college-aged U.S. veterans — which have a staggering unemployment rate of 24 percent — EcoVet pays its workers about $15 an hour along along with stock options and flexible hours to help those that are going back to school.
“They’ve been taught how to get things done,” co-founder Drake Vanhooser told Fast Company. “They all have the skill of being adaptable.”
Thirty-year-old EcoVet shift manager Jeremy Higgs is pursuing an associate’s degree in agriculture, food and life sciences at a local community college. The veteran-friendly environment means employees are understanding of outside responsibilities as well as emotional issues including PTSD.
“Everyone is going through some issues,” Higgs said. “We give each other advice.”
EcoVet is slated to open three more decommission centers in Chicago, the Carolinas and Nevada to add to its Springdale, Arkansas factory. The first is expected to open in the next 18 months. With 15,000 to 20,000 scrap heap trailers going to waste each year, EcoVet is hoping to remove 10,000 trailers from the stream of garbage annually.
MORE: Here’s a New Website Bringing Unemployed Veterans and Understaffed Tech Companies Together
Expansion shouldn’t be too difficult for a sustainable product that’s American-made by U.S. vets, according to Adrian Dominguez, the vice president for business development for EcoVet’s parent company, EcoArk. “It’s a profit center for us,” he said. “We manufacture furniture and wood accessories, and we are able to label it as 100 percent recycled, repurposed wood, made by American veterans, right here in the United States.”
Aside from furnishing Walmart vendors, EcoVet has managed to partner with wholesale retailer Sam’s Club, which features two lines on its website. EcoVet is also developing a high-end line for upscale retailers for the likes of stores like Macy’s.
The hope is to not only eventually pluck all scrap heap trailers out of U.S. waste, but to create a welcoming environment where vets can be proud of their work, too.
ALSO: A New Program Transitions Soldiers into Successful Tradesmen
A Van That Tweets to Help the Homeless
A Christmas Day blizzard pummeled Arkansas in 2012, dumping more than 9 inches of snow on Little Rock — the most in the city’s history. The record-breaking ice, snow and wind contributed to the deaths of a dozen people as the storm traveled across the country and left more than 200,000 in the state without power. People seeking warmth and shelter jammed the city’s hotel rooms or doubled up on relatives’ sofas.
Jimmy Treece didn’t have that luxury. When the freezing temperatures and whiteout conditions hit, he was sleeping in a tent in the woods right outside the city. His bedroom for nearly five months held only a few blankets, some sheets and a slim wardrobe—the staples of a life untethered.
Treece, 61, was among hundreds of homeless people in the Little Rock woods that night. When a two-year prison sentence for drug possession ended the previous summer, he had no place to go. Little Rock’s official homeless population was reported to be between 1,200 and 2,000 in 2013, according to the advocacy group Central Arkansas Team Care for the Homeless, but experts say there could be hundreds more taking cover in the woods to avoid being detected by police. They have good reason to hide: Though Little Rock’s homeless numbers pale in comparison to cities like New York and San Francisco, the National Coalition for the Homeless named Little Rock America’s “meanest city” toward the homeless in 2012 — police harassment and the city-led sweeps are notorious here.
The homeless in the woods rarely “group up,” says Treece, to avoid attracting attention. On Christmas night he was alone in his flooded tent. By daybreak, it had collapsed. The sun rose on December 26 into a cloudless sky, and Treece dug himself out. He was broke and freezing.
But later that morning, he saw a vehicle pull up on a dirt trail not far away. At the wheel was Aaron Reddin, a stocky, goateed 31-year-old whose long hair was tied back with a camouflage bandana.
The Van, as his primary vehicle is known, has become an almost Pavlovian signal of relief to Little Rock’s homeless. Reddin has been driving around the city and into the surrounding woods for the past two years, delivering supplies. To Treece, the sight of Reddin was a lifeline. “I heard the vehicle pull up. I peeked out my tent, and I didn’t think anything, but then once I heard his voice, I knew who it was,” Treece says. “I had nowhere to go. [Reddin] came right on time.” Continue reading “A Van That Tweets to Help the Homeless”