La vitalité
A STORY OF HOPE
ONE PERSON CAN
As a woman who spent the first eight years of her career working at a correctional facility for teen girls who had been classified as juvenile delinquents by the state of Tennessee, Nancy Alcorn understood that the systems in place were not always the way to help every young woman in need of guidance.
Mercy Multiplied founder Nancy Alcorn (center) with some of the program’s graduates. The ministry, built to help young women cope with life-controlling issues, now has locations around the US and abroad. 112 | DECE MBER 2019
he facility where she worked for five years was home to approximately three hundred inmates at any given time—each one sentenced by the court to one year in the facility because they were too young for the women’s prison. “Working for the state on a daily basis gave me direct encounters with government programs funded by taxpayer dollars that were not producing permanent results and changed lives,” Alcorn says. “It broke my heart to see young women leave the correctional facility and go back to the same neighborhoods where pimps, drug dealers, and gang members were waiting for them. Some were murdered by their pimps, others died from
THE WORLD INTERVIEW BY LISA AND GERALD BURWELL PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF MERCY MULTIPLIED
street gang fights, and many died from accidental drug overdoses. In addition, there were quite a few of those girls who committed suicide before the age of eighteen because they felt like they had no hope.” Of the young women who survived to see age eighteen, Alcorn says, many ended up in the women’s prison system anyway due to a lack of getting the help they needed to reform their lives. While pursuing her master’s degree, Alcorn met many of those women while interning at a women’s prison in Nashville. She also spent three years investigating emergency child abuse cases, and says she quickly made a connection that the anger she had witnessed in so many teen girls was something that stemmed from emotional, physical, and sexual abuse they suffered during childhood. “I also realized that we should never judge anyone because we have no idea what they have been through,” she says. “There is always a why behind the what.” Determined to find a better way to help these young women than putting them in a government system, Alcorn moved to Monroe, Louisiana, and founded Mercy Ministries in January of 1983. The faith-based residential program for young women ages thirteen to thirty-two was designed to help them cope with and recover from life-controlling issues, such as anxiety, depression, sexual abuse, eating disorders, self-harm, addictions, unplanned pregnancy, and sex trafficking.
