Reasons To Be Cheerful · 13 hours ago

'They Take Your Brokenness and Put It Together'

At a jail in Topeka, Kansas, a Rotary club built around fighting human trafficking discovered something unexpected: the parking lot outside the women's exit had become a hunting ground, where traffickers waited to claim the most vulnerable at the moment of their release. What grew from that discovery - Intersection to Care - has now assisted more than 1,000 women, offering mentorship, housing, health education, and art therapy, all anchored by the presence of people who know the inside of a cell firsthand. Jodi Whitt, who cycled through that same jail for over 20 years, now has a desk inside it, decorated with affirmational quotes and a ceramic unicorn, and she is there every morning not as an inmate but as a lifeline. Her lived experience proved irreplaceable in ways that credentials could not replicate - as one woman she mentored, Linda Swopes, put it through tears: "The people here, they take your brokenness and put it together. They tell you, you can do this and you're worthy of it, even though you don't feel that way." What the story quietly insists is that transformation rarely travels in one direction - it moves through people, from one woman to the next, each one reaching back toward the gate to receive whoever comes through it next.