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January 28, 2004
"Sandra Barnhill, Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers, Inc."
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Sandra Barnhill of Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers, Inc. (AIM) in Atlanta, and a 2004 Leadership for a Changing World award recipient. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, January 28. Barnhill will discuss AIM’s efforts to assist inmate mothers, their children and other family members in maintaining critically important family ties during the mother's incarceration. Read background Leadership for a Changing World
Welcome to Leadership Talks with Sandra Barnhill of Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers, in Atlanta, and a 2004 Leadership for a Changing World awardee.
Sandra, can you give us a brief history of how you got involved in your work?
Sandra Barnhill
I began doing this work as a lawyer. I did a lot of prisoners’ rights litigation. I just really decided that the law wasn’t the answer, but the answer really lies with people who make social change, so I decided to quit practicing law and create the agency.
atlanta
Why did you decide to have your work focus on the children and not as much on the mothers in prison?
Sandra Barnhill
It was really the outgrowth of a request by the mothers. And one of my primary questions to them is, “How can I best support you?” And their answer is then, “Take care of my kids.” So for the last 17 years, we have endeavored to take care of their children through programs and services that we believe lessen the impact of the mother’s incarceration.
Denver, CO
How have you been able to work with institutions (correctional facilities, prisons) to implement your programs? Has that been a challenging relationship?
Sandra Barnhill
It has been a challenging relationship simply because, while we serve the same people, women/mothers in prison, our approach is very different. I think their approach focuses on both punishment and safety inside of a prison environment. My focus is on empowerment, reconciliation, and restoration. So I think what we’ve learned to do over the years is to coexist. I try to be mindful of what their focus is and I hope that they’re mindful of my focus. I think it’s a healthy give-and-take that we’ve entered into. And I don’t spend a lot of time majoring in the minors. When I come into the system I respect it and try to work within it. I don’t challenge everything and, while I may not always agree, I do try to understand why they do what they do. I readily acknowledge the fact that while the women are locked up, the correctional officers who oversee them are locked up, too. So my hope is that AIM brings a bit of humanity to all people that are inside the prison walls. And I think regardless of our philosophical differences around women, I do think that we agree on one thing and that is the children are our future. So I start from that point. Both of us want to raise healthy, contributing, positive children, that’s a jumping off point.
Washington, DC
Tell us when you came to realize the central importance of human rights as the overarching framework for your public work?
Sandra Barnhill
At the age of 5, when I realized that we live in a racist society. When I was in kindergarten through 4th grade, I was in a segregated school. My sister and I desegregated our school, so I discovered real quick what racism was, and I spent my life working on securing my own rights and the rights of other disenfranchised people. You cannot be black in America and not understand what it means to be on the fringes, to be marginalized. Clearly women in prison are some of the most disenfranchised people I know.
Los Angeles
Can you tell us a little bit about the summer camps and after-school activities that are directed toward children of imcarcerated mothers? What distinguishes them from other after-school programs?
Sandra Barnhill
Both of them are based on working with young people in four intervention areas and that’s academic development, personal development, career development, and cultural and recreation enrichment. I think what distinguishes them from other after-school program is that we openly talk about the fact that their mothers are incarcerated. We have exercises and activities that relate to that, like writing their moms letters, so that’s the difference. Everybody who’s here is in the same situation and there’s no stigma or shame talking about it. If we’re getting ready to go on a prison trip, we talk about it. So if they haven’t signed up, we ask them to sign up. In the larger society they have to hide the fact that their mother’s in prison. Here, we get excited when we’re going on a visit. Sometimes I say to the kids, “I’m going to the prison next week. Do you have any messages for you mom?” Their lives in many ways, part of it, the part that talks about their mom being in prison, it’s behind a veil or a mask. But at AIM we unmask that, we talk about it. We start celebrating when we know somebody’s mom is coming out. Every body celebrates that. In this world there’s too much stuff we have to keep secret and it kills us. At AIM there isn’t that secret.
Cambridge, Mass
Do you find it difficult to focus on the needs of families without getting involved in policy debates over sentencing, nonviolent crimes, and inequalities in the justice system? How do those interests play out in the best interests of your constituency, your staff, and your own instincts as a defense attorney?
Sandra Barnhill
One of the things that I’ve had to work on is keeping the main thing, the main thing. And for AIM, as a small, grassroots nonprofit, our main thing is direct services to the children and family members. However, everything we do is political, so I focus on trying to help the family members become their own advocates. And the women, both incarcerated and released, they’re the people who are most directly affected by this issue, so they need to be at a place where they can sit at a policy table where they can testify, where they can raise all these issues. About 2-3 years ago, we created an initiative called Children and Family Networks, CFN, and the whole purpose of that group is to teach formerly incarcerated parents, family members, and adult children of prisoners how to do advocacy work. So I’m pretty much clear that on a day-to-day basis what I have to do is work on behalf of their children. So I see life as playing the game by raising the stakes, working with the family members so they can find their own voice, and then use that voice to speak truth to power. That’s how I deal with my personal thoughts about reform and social change in the context of my work.
Paterson, NJ
You mentioned seeing the "daily effects of the criminal justice system" in your community. How does your work address race and racism to children who are probably getting mixed messages (from tv, church, and school, that we are all equal; but from their own lives, that we are not treated equally)?
Sandra Barnhill
I think that in many ways the children have it figured out better than we do. They know the difference between what we say and what we do. And my attitude with the young people is I cannot always change your situation or the environment you find yourself in. What I can do is give you skills to cope and to deal with that environment. If I had a magic wand I’d end racism today, right this second, but I don’t. I teach the children what I’ve been taught and I teach it through how I live in the world. Our staff is African-American, European-American, and Latino, and what they see is folks, three different races, coming together, working hard, supporting each other, and making a difference. And I think the children have to understand that while racism is a system, we also have to look at the individual behavior of people.
St. Joseph, Missouri
I'm interested in the caregivers of these children, the grandmothers and family friends who have jobs and families of their own to worry about. What programs, if any, address their needs specifically?
Sandra Barnhill
Our work is done intergenerationally, so we have programs for the mother, the children, and the caregivers. The caregivers operating out of a sense of personal empowerment renamed their program the Guardian Angels. They meet quarterly for continuing education and fellowship. We do a big celebration for them in September, which is Grandparent Appreciation Month. And two other things we do on a monthly basis is have respite care and the other thing we do is home visits and bring them food, cleaning supplies, and we go inside their home and just sit down and listen to them. And I can’t underscore how important that is. Many of the caregivers tell us they’re struggling in a society that doesn’t validate them for what they’re doing. I think they need to know that somebody thinks what they’re doing is important and celebrates them for doing it.
Pittsburgh
Who participates in designing the services and what services have been most valuable to the children?
Sandra Barnhill
Four groups of people participate in the design of the program: the mothers, the children, caregivers, and the staff/board/volunteers. And I guess you might call them more academic resource people while our families are more experiential people, they’re living it everyday. They may not have the book knowledge, but they have the life knowledge. The most valuable service may be taking them to see their mom. That’s a big deal here.
Chicago, IL
Sandra, what do you see as the most important national goals for activists working with imprisoned mothers and their children in the next few years? And what is AIM's role in connection with the national movement?
Sandra Barnhill
I’ll steal from Marian Wright Edelman: The most important goal is to make sure no child is left behind because their parent is in prison. AIM will continue to provide great service, support formerly incarcerated parents and family members as they try to advocate for themselves, and then finally serve as a resource for the President, who’s been talking about incarcerated parents in his State of the Union addresses, and the Congress, who have appropriated money for mentoring these children, so that the policies that they create will meet real needs of real people and not have so many unintended consequences.
St. Patrick, MN
You've been doing this work for 17-18 years now, so you've just about gone through an entire generation. Do you find your work has kept children of prisoners out of prison themselves? Have your successes been able to affect families in a cycle of poverty, or is that the next step?
Sandra Barnhill
Yes, we have so many kids who have gone on to college, the military, to vocational schools, so we've worked with about 10,000 children in these 17 years, and while our agency hasn’t kept detailed statistics a lot of those kids go on to have happy, meaningful lives.
As to the second question, yes and yes and yes. One of the most empowering things for our young people is when graduates of our program come back as counselors, as speakers on Career Day, or serve on our board. We currently have a young woman who graduated from college this past August. She sits on our board of directors and is the secretary of the board. She comes back regularly. She comes to the after-school program and our prison trips. She’s employed full-time by the Department of Juvenile Justice as a counselor for troubled teens. So clearly, she has broken the cycle of poverty. I don’t think she started out to do that. I think she started out to do what every kid at AIM does or goes on to do: to have a good quality of life by being gainfully employed and by giving something back to the community through volunteerism.
New York, NY
What is the balance of your board--i.e., how many constituents, how many colleagues, how many former prisoners, etc.--and how does that dynamic work?
Sandra Barnhill
Right now we have 11 people on our board, 3 of them have been involved in the criminal justice system, 1 person is the child of a former prison, and then the rest is made up of business people, academicians, and community activists.
Philadelphia, PA
We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the Selma voting rights march. How would you make that march real to young people and then to the elected officials who can always improve?
Sandra Barnhill
First of all, I don’t see my job as making it real for elected officials. I would encourage formerly incarcerated people and their caregivers in the CFN network to focus on the elected officials. In terms of the children, we would incorporate information into every aspect of our program. In our after-school program we focus on four centers: homework, a math center, computer center, and a reading center. Children learn in an integrated fashion, so we would focus on an aspect of the march. In each of those centers we would do a field trip, and Alabama is not that far from us, so that the children could see it up close. We generally invite guests to join us. We serve a meal every night at 7:00. Atlanta is rich in civil rights activists, so we would invite somebody who actually participated in it to come and have dinner and share their experience with us.
Raleigh, NC
Among those in the US, and outside of it, who have provided leadership on human rights, who has inspired you? Are there famous people as well as people known best by you?
Sandra Barnhill
In history the “sheroes” that have inspired me have been Fannie Lou Hamer, Madam C.J. Walker, Mother Theresa. Heroes who have influenced me: Dr. King, W.E.B. duBois, Kwame Nkrumah. In contemporary times, it’s the mothers and caregivers that I deal with everyday because, in spite of difficult situations, they persevere and create a life for themselves. And that to me is worth honor and emulation.
Long Island, NY
How would you describe your leadership style, and how has it made you effective in working with incarcerated mothers and their families, prison officials, etc.?
Sandra Barnhill
My style is primarily that of a servant leader and I think that comes out of my background as a Christian, out of my faith. And that means that for me I try to understand where people are coming from. I try to approach my work from the standpoint that I come to the table as a learner. I also try to value all kinds of degrees, whether they’re the academic degrees or that they’re life degrees. I think the biggest thing I do is I just admit what is true: I don’t have all the answers. I don’t always know what the right thing is to do, but I’m committed to doing something. And if that something doesn’t work, I don’t have such a high level of investment in it that I won’t change. And I hope what I do for young up-and-coming leaders is what nobody did for me, which is create a place at the table. When I realized they wouldn’t create a place for me, I just created my own table. But we need to be creating through the leaders places at the table for people so they don’t have to create a whole new one, so they can challenge right from there in a good seat.
Leadership for a Changing World
We're about out of time. This will be the last question today.
How do you sustain yourself and your staff while working on difficult social issues?
Sandra Barnhill
I have a spiritual center and I encourage my staff to get one because I think that’s the way I survive. And then we have a lot of mental health breaks here. Sometimes in the middle of the day we’ll put the music on and dance or sometimes we’ll just have a cup of tea or talk over a meal, you know, things that are inexpensive, but things that make a difference. I encourage the staff to care about one another. We really bear witness to one another’s lives. I don’t think you can do this kind of hard and heart work without building community and building family, so I encourage my staff to build family. I let them get to know me. Some leaders feel like you shouldn’t let the people get to know you, but that never worked for me. I think my strength is because I have allowed my staff to get up close and personal with me and I’ve risked getting close to them. We see each other’s foibles, but we see something more powerful and that’s the human spirit. And it’s that spirit that allows us to come up here everyday and do the work and go behind the wall, not give up and not be totally discouraged.
Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you again for joining us for today's Leadership Talk with Sandra Barnhill. For more information about Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers:
Sandra Barnhill
Executive Director, CEO
Aid to Children of Imprisoned Mothers, Inc. (AIM)
906 Ralph David Abernathy Blvd.
Atlanta, GA 30310
Phone: 404-755-3262
Email: barnhill@takingaim.net
Web: www.takingaim.net
Sandra Barnhill
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