1. Providing men and women in prison with an effective tool for rehabilitation and change through the publication and free distribution of the book, Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom, to prison libraries and programs nationwide. *
   
   
2. Facilitating the expanded use of Houses of Healing through in-prison teaching and through the mentoring of staff and volunteers in the teaching of Houses of Healing courses and programs. Lionheart publishes and distributes the Houses of Healing Training Manual and the Houses of Healing Educational & Training Video Series for these purposes. Lionheart also provides professional training for frontline rehabilitation staff nationwide.
   
   
3. Leading public education efforts to engender a more rational and enlightened approach to violence prevention, sentencing, and incarceration in the U.S.
   
   
   *  The foundation makes free copies of the book Houses of Healing available to:
   

• Every prison and jail library in the United States
  
  
• Prison staff, chaplains, and volunteers seeking to start up Houses of Healing programs or to augment existing programs such as life skills, anger management, violence prevention, and substance abuse treatment (when funds to purchase books are not available)
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• Prisoners who request a personal copy of Houses of Healing and are unable to afford the reduced prisoner rate
  
  

Houses of Healing has become an integral part of prison programming. Today, more than 75,000 copies, in both English and Spanish, can be found in prisons across the country, where substance abuse and mental health counselors, educators, chaplains, administrators, volunteers and prisoners alike are praising its positive impact.

The National Emotional Literacy Project for Youth-at-Risk

The enormous success of Lionheart's National Emotional Literacy Project for Prisoners has paved the way and built a solid foundation for Lionheart's new major endeavor, The National Emotional Literacy Project for Youth-at-Risk.

Over the years, many juvenile detention centers and programs for at-risk youth embraced and utilized Lionheart’s Houses of Healing program, despite the fact that the material was written for adults. Without an existing integrated and effective prevention and rehabilitation curriculum written specifically for youth-at-risk, treatment staff across the country asked Lionheart to create a version of Houses of Healing that would address the unique emotional, cognitive, and social needs of this population.

In response, Lionheart has developed, piloted, and published POWER SOURCE: Taking Charge of Your Life. Power Source was written by Houses of Healing author Robin Casarjian, M.A., and child psychologist Bethany Casarjian, Ph.D. A major distribution effort was launched in 2003. It includes nationwide free distribution of POWER SOURCE and supporting material to the following:

• youth detention facilities throughout the USA
  
• youthful offender programs in adult institutions
  
• residential schools and group homes for at-risk youth
  
• non-residential schools and community programs for at-risk youth
  
  

Complementing the POWER SOURCE book and facilitator's manual, the Lionheart Foundation plans to produce a POWER SOURCE educational video series. Staff training are available on a limited basis. A research and evaluation component is currently being developed.


A Brief History of The Lionheart Foundation

Volunteering in a Massachusetts state prison in 1988, Robin Casarjian developed a course for inmates entitled "Emotional Awareness/ Emotional Healing." Witnessing the profound impact this course repeatedly had on prisoners, Robin was inspired to bring her work to prisoners across the country.

Her vision was to capture the essence of the course – respect, encouragement, new teachings and ideas, practical "hands on" exercises, questions for reflection and self-exploration, as well as personal accounts from prisoners – in a book that would be easily available to prisoners anywhere in the country.

Toward this end she wrote Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom, with the intent of distributing free copies to all prison libraries in the U.S. She founded the non-profit Lionheart Foundation in 1992 in order to support this endeavor. She called the project The National Emotional Literacy Project for Prisoners (NELPP).


Lionheart Today

Houses of Healing has increasingly become an integral part of prison programming, and has, in some institutions, changed the nature of programming. In addition to the "bottom up" distribution effort (directly to prisoners through the prison library), Lionheart has moved to a "top down" approach. Underwritten by the foundation, Lionheart conducted statewide trainings in emotional literacy skills for front-line correctional rehabilitation counselors 15 states to over 1500 corrections professionals.

Lionheart also partnered with the Alabama Department of Corrections and the Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelbourne Falls, MA. Through this partnership, two intensive ten-day meditation retreats were conducted at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison considered the end of the line in the Alabama prison system. Lionheart is documenting the convergence of this prison and this ancient meditation program in a full-length documentary film, Freedom Behind Bars.

Having launched its prison project in an unprecedented decade in US history—when the prison population grew from one million to two million, one thousand new prisons and jails were constructed, and the tenor of the criminal justice system became increasingly punitive—Lionheart continues to speak out. In its grassroots public education effort, it offers a cohesive picture of the prison-industrial complex and advocates strongly for the need to transform prisons into places of healing and restoration.

The enormous success of Lionheart’s prison project has paved the way and built a solid foundation for Lionheart's newest major endeavor, The National Emotional Literacy Project for Youth-at-Risk, launched in Spring, 2003. As with the adult project, Lionheart distributes, free of charge, multiple free copies of POWER SOURCE: Taking Charge of Your Life and supporting material to juvenile detention facilities throughout the United States as well as to programs serving highly at-risk youth and young adults in the greater community.