UPEI donates books to Saint John's Elizabeth Fry Society’s Mother/Child Read Aloud program

Mothers who are in Canada's prison system are usually separated from their children, but the Elizabeth Fry Society of Saint John New Brunswick has a program that keeps the connection between mothers and children alive through reading.

For the past nine years, the society, which is dedicated to supporting women who are in prison or at risk, has operated a program called Mother/Child Read Aloud. Mothers in prison record themselves reading children's books, using books and equipment provided by the society. Those books, the recording and the equipment to play the recording are given to their children, so that they can have books read to them in their mothers' voices.

Dr. Shannon Murray, professor of English at the University of Prince Edward Island, heard about this project and decided to get her students and the campus involved. She asked Elizabeth Fry Society representatives Marianna Stack and Denise Durette if they would speak to two of her classes before the end of the semester. When they agreed, Murray put out a call for new children's books and ended up with a donation of 130 for the project.

'Anyone who has ever read to a child knows how powerful and important that experience is. I was thrilled with the response of UPEI and its students to this wonderful program,' says Murray.

Stack and Durette were elated to get the new books.

'It has been a struggle to secure funding and new books since we began in 2000,' she says.'We have received many wonderful one-time donations of books from authors and publishers. Often people who hear about this program donate. Every bit helps.'

She estimates that through this volunteer-run program, the society has reached over 1,000 children and 500 mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, godparents and friends.

'We cannot even begin to measure the others that we reached such as older siblings, caregivers, school friends, etc. The list could go on and on.'

In 1999 Stack, who volunteered with women in prison, learned about a similar program for women in prison in Oklahoma. An educator, she felt that it had possibilities for mothers in prison in New Brunswick. She received permission from the original creator in the U.S. to go ahead with it in Canada, and after eventually securing funding from the Greater Saint John Community Foundation, Mother/Child Read Aloud was born the following year.

Since then, the program has grown to include the Nova Institution in Truro, Nova Scotia, in addition to mothers in prison in New Brunswick, says Stack. In New Brunswick, four to six women in the Saint John Regional Correctional Centre read to their children each week, and then the society mails the books throughout it and other provinces where the children are living. Volunteers also take the program to the Nova Institution six times a year. On their last visit they sent 190 books, tapes and Walkmans to 63 children in seven provinces and even to faraway Portugal.

Stack is proud to say that the Mother/Child Read Aloud program is expanding. After attending a workshop given by the New Brunswick group, the Elizabeth Fry Society of Quebec now offers the program in a provincial jail and in the Joliette Institution for Women in Quebec.

Families who have been involved in the program show their appreciation through letters, pictures and cards, which are carefully preserved in scrapbooks.

'I was at the post office two weeks ago, mailing books, when a former woman prisoner came in with her teenage son,' she says. 'We were chatting, and she said to him, ‘Do you remember all the books and taped stories you got in the mail when you were little? Well, this is the lady who sent them.' He remembered. It made it all worth it for me.'

Photo: Dr. Shannon Murray (left), of UPEI's Department of English, and Marianna Stack (centre) and Denise Durette (right), of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Saint John New Brunswick, display some of the 130 children's books collected by the UPEI campus community for the society's Mother/Child Read Aloud program.