Well, Harmony on World, anyway.
Or maybe this should be titled “Headings for World”?
Her name is Harmony
I know that girl! She’s the daughter of one of my babyhood friends and good buddies, Darrell. (We grew up in Mexico together.)
Many WORLD readers nominated compassionate ministries for this year’s Hope Award for Effective Compassion contest. Charity expert Jill Lacey and I researched and assessed the entries and then sent a reporter and a photographer out on the road to see firsthand what groups are doing.
The first fruits of this exploration are on the pages that follow. We chose three finalists—Christ Clinic in Spokane, Youth Horizons in Wichita, and New Horizons in Colorado—and in San Diego late last month announced the champion: New Horizons.
Source: Effective compassion
Wow! Congratulations to New Horizons. God bless them in their service. And Harmony and other nannies also.
Fremont County, Colo., is proud of its prisons. The county has 13 of them, nine state and four federal institutions that communities like Cañon City welcome for the boost they bring to the local economies. The prisoners, bused in under guard, serve their terms and upon release return to the state’s urban centers. For Cañon City, in the foothills south of Pike’s Peak, prisoners represent wealth: They bring in dollars and take their problems back home with them.
Some non-prison people also come to Cañon City, serve their terms, and go home—but in the process they help female prisoners keep their families together. Every year, young Mennonite men and women come from the Midwest to Colorado and care for the infant children of incarcerated women.
That story began in 1990, when Loren Miller took a one-year leave of absence from his job at a Bible college in Pennsylvania. He moved his family to Colorado, obeying a call from God. It was no more specific than that, just a small, still voice in his heart telling him that Colorado needed him. So he began to look for a mission. He learned that when a woman gives birth while incarcerated, Colorado, like most states, automatically places her children in foster care. Since the deadline for reclaiming their children typically falls while the mothers are still in custody, most will never have the chance to be reunited with their babies. Thinking there’s a better way, Miller founded New Horizons Ministry as a Mennonite mission.
In 1991 the ministry took power of attorney over its first infant. Since then it has cared for over 142 children. Now, when a mother gives birth in prison, she signs a power of attorney to New Horizons, and the baby’s nanny, typically a 19- or 20-year-old, picks up the baby the same day. The infant is raised in a loving, Christian home. The nanny and baby visit the mother in prison every week, giving the mother a chance to see her baby grow. Upon release, the baby is returned to the mother, giving mother and child a second chance at being a family.
The nannies are not on their own: They live together under the supervision of house parents such as Merv and Barb Helmuth. Merv Helmuth is in his 50s, a retired electrician from Iowa. All of his own children are grown, so it’s easy to see why, even after 16 months in Colorado, he’s still amused to be once again living in a house of infants: “It feels like starting over again, being around all these small children.”
I visited with the Helmuths at “Hannahs House,” in Penrose, Colo., a half hour from Cañon City. The Helmuths live here with their daughter Karen and Harmony Headings, two of New Horizon’s nannies. Seen sitting around the dining room table, with Merv’s neatly trimmed gray beard (no mustache) and the women’s head coverings, they could be a traditional Mennonite family . . . except for the three Hispanic babies sitting on laps or in high chairs. This is a New Horizons nuclear family.