Key points:
- Former inmates credit fellow Indianapolis resident Cecelia Whitfield and her Use What You've Got Ministry for helping them turn their lives around.
- Use What You've Got offers transportation to family and friends of inmates on visiting days at prisons.
- Cost for the service is based on ability to pay.
One woman’s misfortune led to another’s rebirth in Indianapolis.
Nowadays, Angela Conley runs a business called BEME Enterprises (pronounced “Be Me”).
“I help young adults start their own businesses properly,” she explained. “I get them registered, get them funded … and hopefully help them get city and state contracts.”
Impressive, especially considering the five years Conley spent in prison for charges related to her work as a mortgage broker during the 2007-2010 subprime mortgage crisis.
Conley’s journey out of prison and into a prosperous life — which includes her six children doing well — was aided immeasurably by another Indianapolis woman, Cecelia Whitfield, a member of North United Methodist Church.
Whitfield’s future — and by extension Conley’s — was forged by the 40-year sentence Whitfield’s son got for armed robbery, months after he graduated from a prestigious prep school. The crime happened because of his drug addiction.
Whitfield said she was “devastated.”
“I lost 50 pounds overnight and started visiting him and another young man,” she said. As she got to know the families of other prisoners, she started getting requests for rides to the prison on visiting days.
“I said, ‘Doesn’t the state offer transportation for us?’ The answer was ‘No.’”
While driving home one day, she said she heard the Lord say, “Start a prison shuttle service.”
More than three decades later, Whitfield estimates that her Use What You've Got Prison Ministry has shuttled 100,000 people to visit relatives in dozens of Indiana prisons, racking up 700,000 miles of travel. In that time, she says an organization bus has never broken down during a trip and she has never received a complaint from the Indiana Department of Correction about any of the visitors.
The nonprofit ministry is based at North United Methodist Church. The cost for a ride to a prison is based on ability to pay.
Conley got to know Whitfield because Use What You've Got transported her five children to see her on visiting days at the Indiana Women’s Prison.
“I had five kids when I was incarcerated,” Conley said. “They were pretty young — 2, 3, 4, 10 and 12. And then I had (another) daughter while I was incarcerated.”
Whitfield did more for her family than take them to visit her, Conley said, including helping Conley’s grandmother get one of her daughter’s involved with a Brownies troop.
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“She really connected with the families, not just my family,” Conley said. “She would help them with other social services. … My grandmother, she was totally unaware of the justice system and how to raise kids these days, but it was kind of thrown up on her because of my mistakes. So Miss Cecelia helped a lot of people bridge the gap to understanding the judicial system and navigating through it.”
Whitfield has had to become a fundraiser as well, a role she was able to devote more time to after hiring a driver. She did all the driving herself for the first 19 years of Use What You've Got.
“We have a dinner; we have a Christmas (event); we have a breakfast as a fundraiser, and all that gives us money to do things like bus repairs,” she said.
She would like to expand her service to all of Indiana.
“My vision is to expand it, because … (many families of inmates) don’t live in Indianapolis,” Whitfield said. “They live all over the state.”
The Christmas party serves as a therapeutic event for the children of inmates, as does a mothers’ day out Whitfield put together.
“I was taking the children home and they were living in a really bad area and they were so depressed when they would leave their fathers and their mothers,” she remembered.
She said that of the hundreds of children who she has transported and have attended her Christmas parties, none of them has gone to prison.
“We create an experience for the children when they come to our Christmas party. I have video games and there’s running around and just embracing each other. So that gives them that experience.”
The mothers’ getaway started after Whitfield purchased a timeshare in French Lick, a resort destination in Indiana.
“I noticed some of the mothers — where they live — so I started a women's retreat to French Lick. … So we started doing a wellness retreat, taking them and getting them out of their environment of the guns and drugs.”
Richard Samuels, who spent 26 years in prison, also credits Use What You've Got Ministry for being a major part of his rehabilitation.
“When people don’t come to see you, there’s a loneliness, there’s an alienation and then it’s so much harder to reconnect,” Samuels said. “But when you have someone that comes to see you on a regular basis, it’s almost like you have one foot still out there.”
Today, Samuels is an activist on prison issues and has his own charitable organization, The Growing Indy Group, which provides “information, education, resources and training to justice-involved individuals and families living in impoverished and underserved neighborhoods.”
Conley believes she had the fortitude to turn her life around on her own, but says Whitfield and Use What You've Got did make a big difference to her and perhaps even more for her children.
“They told me my kids had a 93% chance of repeating the cycle,” she said. “Now, my kids are business owners. My daughter just got out of the military. My son’s a teacher.
“So I know that being able to keep that relationship going, even when I was incarcerated, changed and helped a lot for them to be who they are today.”
Patterson is a UM News reporter in Nashville, Tennessee. Contact him at 615-742-5470 or newsdesk@umnews.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free Daily or Weekly Digests.
