The Insight Alliance recently hosted our annual Spring Celebration fundraiser on May 19th, 2022. In total, we raised just over $100,000 and had around 100 guests in attendance. There was a lot of love and support at our event, as well as opportunities for growth and change. A key theme that emerged was around anti-racism and inclusion and ways that our event could have better aligned with our values.

My relationship with the world of research began in 2018 after a successful meeting at Coffee Creek with Leonard Dunn (former head of Corrections Counseling) and Chris Randall (Corrections Rehabilitation Manager). Susan Stoltenberg, the Executive Director of the YWCA, had introduced me to this team to talk about bringing our program to the adults in custody (AICs) on the medium security side of Coffee Creek. There seemed to be many programs on the minimum side, but very few on the medium side so we agreed to start there. Mr. Dunn suggested that if we wanted our program to be more than just a volunteer program, we would need to research Insight to Wellbeing so that it would be an evidence-based practice. At this point, researching our program hadn’t even occurred to me. It made perfect sense, so we set out to identify a partner who could help. Little did I know what a research project would entail!

The underground train system in London (the Tube) is filled with old rail lines that date back hundreds of years. In more recent times, the old trains have been replaced by newer models that aren’t as big and clunky, which often creates a bigger gap between the train and the platform. There are big painted signs on the floor saying, “Mind the Gap.” The conductor often calls out over the loudspeaker for people to step over the gap between the platform and the train since you can fall down it!