The Angel Tree Network is a special charity program for children of incarcerated individuals. The founders discovered that many people in prison wanted to let their children know they still loved them by asking volunteers to provide gifts for their kids. Gerald Barkman is the Manitoba Co-ordinator of the Angel Tree Program and tells us how it all comes together.



Barkman notes the prisoners involved are all a part of a prison fellowship ministry. In total they have 465 children signed up in Manitoba, and more than 28 hundred children across Canada. He shares they have many great volunteers to work with, and more donors get involved with buying toys each year. He has a message for those who choose to help these families.



Barkman was asked why he thinks the program has so much support here in Manitoba.




The Angel Tree Story

Angel Tree started over three decades ago by an ex-prisoner. Mary Kay was a shotgun-packing bank robber and adept safecracker who made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list. Arrested in June of 1972, she quickly collected 11 federal indictments and 35 charges against her.

"When I was arrested, I thought my life was over… God was about to step in,” says Mary Kay Beard, the founder of Angel Tree.

Her 180-year sentence turned into a six-year sentence — and her broken and troubled life became a testimony of God's power and blessings.

"I am both awed and humbled to have been a part of something so enormously effective," says Mary.

When Mary Kay was paroled in 1982, she became Prison Fellowship's first state director of Alabama. She was asked to create a Christmas program for prisoners. And she immediately thought about the women she'd met in prison.

You see, every year at Christmas, volunteers brought toiletries in for the inmates. The women would wrap them in colored paper and give them to their children as Christmas presents.

Mary Kay thought the children would snub the tiny soaps, shampoos and tubes of toothpaste. But to her surprise—just like any other child on Christmas morning—the gifts were eagerly accepted with excitement and gratitude.

Remembering the children's joy, Mary Kay's plan was to erect a Christmas tree at Birmingham's Brookwood Mall, encouraging shoppers to buy presents for the children of prisoners. Someone suggested writing the children's names on paper ornaments shaped like angels—creating an "Angel Tree!"

FOR THE FULL STORY visit...   http://www.angeltree.org/deliverlove-who/15696-angel-tree-deliver-love-mary-kay-beard