Aspire to Inspire - I

I teach in an adult male prison. One day a year we have graduation ceremonies for our career technical graduates and our GED and high school graduates. It is my favorite day of the year. Our facility is a tough place to live, work, and study. Most of our students have committed serious felonies (assault, armed robbery, rape, domestic violence and the like). Many came from deeply at risk backgrounds and have experienced a lot of trauma and failures. There are a lot of burned bridges and feelings of guilt left behind them. I love graduation for two reasons. First, it makes the men feel so good to experience success and have an achievement recognized. Second, they are permitted two visitors for graduation. Wives, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, children. Their family members are often moved to tears by seeing their loved ones achieve this milestone. It gives them hope for the future. For the inmates, it is one of the few times they can just be human and hang with their families and have pride in doing something right for them. I was wearing my Aspire to Inspire strap for graduation today. Our speaker was a former inmate, now a restored citizen, working for our department which happens to be the administration that at one time supervised his incarceration. He had done a fifteen year sentence, graduated, taken career technical programs and college, and gotten out and gone to work to rebuild his life. He "spoke prison" to our students, "keeping it real" as we say in prison lingo, and in a very heartfelt and passionate way, he gave them both realism and hope that they too could follow a similar path back out. He finished his graduation speech and went out into the seats, giving every one of them a fist bump, walking up and down all the rows. Some of the students bear hugged him. Their response to what he had to say was visceral and immediate. You could see the connection and hope in their faces. I knew right then that Aspire to Inspire was on the wrong person's wrist and so I gave it to him. He thanked me profusely multiple times, told me I had no idea how much I had made his day and how much it meant to him. He even came up to me again later asking questions about the strap, its meaning, and the company. What a great memory for graduation 2019!