Who we are
People with Purpose inspires and supports adults and youth who are involved with the criminal justice system to achieve their goals and dreams and lead purposeful and productive lives through life coaching.
Life coaching focuses on four questions:
- What are your dreams and goals?
- What is your plan to achieve your dreams and goals?
- How will you stay committed to your plan?
- How will you know when you’ve gotten there?
Think about a time you accomplished a goal, made your dream come true, and you were living a purposeful life. How did that make you feel? Energized? Proud? Alive? PWP will give these feelings and more to people incarcerated in detention centers, jails, and prisons and people on probation and parole. We believe that when people reenter society on a more purposeful path they will achieve their dreams and goals and reduce the rate of recidivism and incarceration in the Saint Louis area.
“The American prison system illustrates the philosophical and practical difference between the choice to perceive sin or to perceive error. We see criminals as guilty and seek to punish them. But whatever we do to others, we are doing to ourselves. Statistics painfully prove that our prisons are schools for crime; a vast number of crimes are committed by people who have already spent time in prison. In punishing others, we end up punishing ourselves. Does that mean we’re to forgive a rapist, tell him we know he just had a bad day and send him home? Of course not. We’re to ask for a miracle. A miracle here would be a shift from perceiving prisons as houses of punishment to perceiving them as houses of rehabilitation. When we consciously change their purpose from fear to love, we release infinite possibilities of healing.”