Keep the Prisoner Correspondence Network running!

It’s truly life-changing to be able to exchange news, art and human friendship with someone. For people in New Zealand prisons, it can be a powerful source of hope and imagination. By connecting incarcerated people with the outside world, the Prisoner Correspondence Network offers them a lifeline and a future.

Right now, PCN connects 225 penpals on the inside with three times as many people on the outside, and our numbers have grown eightfold in the last year. The logistical and pastoral work involved in running this is no longer sustainable purely through volunteer efforts. It’s a full-time job and then some.

We want PCN to last. We want to be able to continue to grow without being forced to turn people away. To this, we need to support its current volunteer facilitators to continue this work by providing them with an income, at least temporarily.

Here’s the game plan: We’re planning to pay the existing coordinators $25 an hour, for 20 hours a week over twelve weeks. Any extra funds will go toward the volunteer developer who’s been hard at work for months coding a system that will streamline and automate part of the work. We’ve got plans in the works to make this a larger effort by more volunteers as well, and we’re hoping that these three months will be all we need to keep PCN running until we can make that happen.

We need you. We need people on the outside who believe that everyone deserves human friendship, and who are willing to write, donate, fetch mail, and contribute in any other way they can. We’re so, so grateful for every single volunteer we’ve had, and we’re looking forward to many more years of PCN ahead.

In love and solidarity,

People Against Prisons Aotearoa