Hey friends! A while back, I wrote about letter writing to seniors and folks in a homeless shelter as a way to hopefully bring some cheer to others. I have a couple more resources for this to share with y'all! :)

First, @ibbtammy had asked if I knew of any email options, as paper mail isn't reliable/is expensive in some places, and I still haven't found one that does email with seniors, but I have found one that does email for prisoners, and it doesn't give the prisoner your full name (only your first name) or email address or anything; everything is sent through the organization and they even read it to make sure nothing inappropriate goes through (in either direction; as I've mentioned before prison letter rules can be absurd, like your paper or envelope aren't white enough gets you rejected). So you send the organization your letter via email, and they print it out without any identifying information and give it to your prison penpal; your prison penpal then writes back to the organization, and they forward it to your email. So you can feel safe having a prison penpal if you worry about them having your address or something like that.

You can submit a letter here: https://www.letters4support.org/send-a-letter

Remember that a lot of prisoners are very cut off from the outside world and dehumanized. Most of them are not in prison for anything monstrous. Per https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html: 25% of the typical daily jail population are in for misdemeanors; 35,500 of those locked up are youth, and "there are 2,700 youth behind bars for non-criminal violations of their probation rather than for a new offense. An additional 700 youth are locked up for 'status' offenses, which are 'behaviors that are not law violations for adults such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.'" " ...over 6,000 people are in federal prisons for criminal convictions of immigration offenses," "25,000 people are involuntarily committed in state psychiatric hospitals and civil commitment centers," and 1 in 5 people are locked up for a drug offense. These are not killers and rapists. They are members of our community.

Writing Seniors

I have a second writing seniors org (still snail mail though, sorry), and this one you are writing to facilities like nursing homes, assisted living centers, or Meals on Wheels programs, and they distribute the letters to the recipients. The way it works is the activities director or the Meals on Wheels volunteer will post how many letters they need to be able to give one to all their seniors who could use some cheering up, and so you'll see a facility and a number of how many letters they need and you can volunteer to send one or ten or however many you want to that one facility during that request period (usually around two weeks). I've only seen one Meals on Wheels group (for non US-ers, Meals on Wheels is an organization that brings meals to homebound seniors, so they aren't in a nursing home but they may be sick or disabled or otherwise unable to really get out and about but they still live in their homes) say that they had some seniors who would be interested in pen pals where they write back to you, and if you wanted to do that you would write "penpal OK" on your envelope and they would give those ones to the folks who were looking for penpals with your address; otherwise the letters are anonymous (so you write "Dear Friend" or some such since you don't know specifically who it is going to at the facility).

The letters are going to the US, Canada, Australia, and England in the current cycle, but they're not all English language; here in the US at least a lot of facilities have other language requests, and you can search by language and write to seniors who speak whatever language(s) you speak!

The org is https://www.lettersagainstisolation.com/

Also,

the org I mentioned last time, Love For Our Elders, there is a recipient in New Zealand this month, and I think (not sure, just based on photos I've seen on their social media but that could just be photographer choice and not indicative of the actual number of letters received) the non-US addresses receive fewer letters, since I think most of the writers are in the US and maybe everyone doesn't have the extra postage (if you don't have international stamps, it's three regular stamps to send a letter to another country). So if you are interested and can send a letter to NZ this month, that would be fab! :)

Specific Prisoners

Here are a couple of prisoner support pages I've found (I have written to them, but haven't heard back yet at this point):

https://supportmariusmason.org/write-marius/
https://freealexstokes.com/

Marius was imprisoned for being a part of Earth and Animal Liberation Front actions, and Alex was at a protest/counter protest as a journalist and defended himself and three protesters from an attack from Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (for non-USers, alt right white supremacist groups), and got sentenced to TWENTY YEARS IN PRISON. For defending himself and three other people from being attacked. His trial was really unfair, check out his support site. So if you'd like to write a prisoner who isn't even in there, for, yanno, actual crime...

I was about to post the support site for a third prisoner, but I clicked on it to double check and he was given bond! Woohoo!

Thanks for all your letter writing efforts, I hope these links are useful! :)