5th Annual Christmas Gift Packing for the Indiana Women’s Prison

Dec 15

COF’s 5th Annual Christmas Gift Packing for the Indiana Women’s Prison

Each December, Constructing Our Future (COF) gathers for one of our most meaningful traditions: our annual Christmas Gift Packing for women incarcerated at the Indiana Women’s Prison. This year marked our 5th consecutive yearhonoring dignity, care, and connection during the holiday season. This year we served 650!

Volunteers packed gift bags with essential hygiene items and personal care products, reminding women inside that they are seen, valued, and remembered. What began as a modest effort has grown into a powerful act of collective care, supported by our COF volunteers which comprises members from our COF Staff, COF Board, COF Residents, Eastern Star Church, Butler University, First Financial Bank, Friends Fellowship and other formerly incarcerated community members.

This initiative reflects COF’s broader mission to support women before, during, and after incarceration. We could not accomplish this without the support of our board and Broadway United Methodist Church and donations from I Support the Girls, Deborah’s Place, Eastern Star Church . We are deeply grateful to everyone who contributed to making this tradition possible and to ensuring that hundreds of women receive a reminder of hope this Christmas. IT TAKES A VILLAGE and WE GOT IT DONE IN A SNOWSTORM!!!

Donation Pickups

Packing Day 1

Packing Day 2

Packing and Delivery Day 3

Gift Distribution

Michelle Daniel

Michelle Daniel Jones, ABD is a sixth-year doctoral student in the American Studies New York University. Michelle’s dissertation focuses on creative liberation strategies of incarcerated people. As an organizer, collaborator, and subject matter expert she creates opportunities to speak truth to power and serves in the development and operation of taskforces and initiatives to reduce harm and end mass incarceration. She has joined Second Chance Educational Alliance as a Senior Research Consultant and the Women Transcending Oral History Project as a co-researcher. and serves on the boards of Worth Rises and Correctional Association of New York and advisory boards of the Jamii Sisterhood, the Survivor’s Justice Project, The Education Trust, Urban Institute and ITHAKA's Higher Ed in Prison Project.

She is Executive Director of Constructing Our Future, a housing organization created by incarcerated women in Indiana. Michelle author and co-editor of the award-winning Who Would Believe a Prisoner: Indiana Women’s Carceral Institutions, 1848-1920, published by the New Press. As an artist, Michelle finds ways to funnel her research into theater, dance and photography. Her co-authored play, “The Duchess of Stringtown” was produced in 2017 in Indianapolis and New York and her artist installation about weaponized stigma, “Point of Triangulation,” ran in New York 2019 and 2020, Philadelphia 2021 with a public mural. “Makes Me Wanna Holla: Art, Death and Imprisonment, explores COVID-19 in prisons, ran in Chicago 2023 and producer on the film, Degrees of Freedom that premiered in 2024.

https://www.michelledanieljones@gmail.com