WHEN Jen Litch went to prison last year for her second drug-related offense, she felt totally hopeless. She had let down her two young children, again. “I felt I should give up, because I wasn’t ever going to make it,” she says. “I wasn’t going to be any different, ever.”
Even so, inside jail, there was one program that sparked her interest. It was a hands-on training project in the construction trades.
“We counted: there were 60 real and significant partners in the project,” including private businesses, says Tiffany Bluemle, executive director of Vermont Works for Women.
As a former inmate who became a crew leader on the project, Jen Litch knows well how much it meant to the two dozen women who spent, altogether, a year building the new home. It was partly that they learned a trade that could get them a decent job after their release, which a number of program graduates have done—including Litch, who now works for Engelberth Construction.
When the Governor and other dignitaries came to the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the home that the women had built, she says, “it was a really, really proud moment in their lives. You could see how much it meant to them. It beamed from their faces.”