Serving Prisoners - Opportunity

Jamiat Am
1

Greetings friends,

I hope you have had peaceful holy days and are preparing for this new year.

For 40+ years, the Inayatiyya (under the Kinship Activity) has offered free spiritual books to prisoners to support them during their incarceration. This project was begun by June Ross, and has been held by several people, most recently Mikail Davenport. We are looking for someone new to take on this focus. Details are outlined below. Please contact rabia@kinshipactivity.org if you are interested in serving in this way.

  1. We are looking for someone to take over administrative work for the Prison Book Project (PBP) . This is something that requires accuracy and organizing: keeping a list of prisoners who request a book; contacting Pathways Books (one or twice a month) to order books and have them sent with a note directly to the prisoner. We will be focusing on sharing Murshid’s books, but any paper back book in the Suluk Press catalog is eligible. For ease and accuracy we would prefer one person take this on. For personal safety, this person needs to open or have a post office box to receive requests. We would like the new PBP holder to intend to hold this role for at least a year.

  2. We welcome one person or a team to help conduct outreach for the PBP. We have a nice flier promoting the program. We are looking for people who have prisoner connections or are willing to reach out to people who have been offering services in prisons.

In the Kinship papers Murshid says: :

One object is prison reform; that those put in prison, sometimes in prison for the whole life and sometimes for part of their life, need spiritual help in order to endure the whole life sentence or to make the best use of the part of life that they live.

Please contact me if any of this appeals to you.

Fondly,
Rabia

2

Dear Rabia - I work as a prison chaplain here in the UK, and as a letter writer for the Prison Phoenix Trust. so it would probably be difficult for me to co-ordinate a mainly US-based service, but I can certainly distribute flyers to the people that I see and write to here in the UK. The Human Kindness Foundation in the US would be good people to engage with - Warmest wishes, Injil

3

Thanks Injli,

Human Kindness looks like a good connection for us. We’ll follow up. I agree it would be hard to coordinate a US based program. We’ll hope others step up.

Best,
Rabia

4

Hello Rabia, would you send me your email address? the one listed did not work for some reason and i would like to reply to your need for someone to take this position. thank you, hira bai (debhirabai@yahoo.com)