In February 2017, when Keia Blount was preparing to be released after serving a five-year prison term at the North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women, she had no idea where to go.

“Family was not an option to go back to,” she says. “There was nowhere for me to go except for a shelter.”

At the last minute, she found Benevolence Farm in Graham, North Carolina, a transitional residential and employment program on an organic farm. She applied, a few members of the staff came to visit her in prison, and within in a week, she was admitted—just in time for her release.

“Women will be released from state prisons, but they are not guaranteed safe and secure housing,” says Kristen Powers, the executive director of Benevolence Farm.

Due to the war on drugs, which began in the early 1970s, the number of women in U.S. federal and state prisons grew by nearly 800% between 1978 and 2014. But a corresponding increase in services for those women never arrived, says Powers.

As a result, in North Carolina alone, more than 2,000 women are released from state prisons each year without the infrastructure in place to adequately support them. This dearth of services prompted Tanya Jisa, a social worker who had worked at a juvenile detention center, to launch Benevolence Farm in 2008 based on her own love of farming and desire to help women break free of the prison cycle. Benevolence was created as a place where the principles of horticultural therapy could be applied to help women readjust to life outside of prison.

After acquiring the land through a donation in 2014 and preparing and cultivating it, Jisa took on their first resident, Melissie Davis, in December 2016. Blount was the second. Now, nearly five years later, the farm has hosted a total of 30 women, including the four currently residing there. By the end of the year, the house should be full with six residents. Benevolence residents stay an average one to one-and-a-half years, with a maximum stay of two years.

“Prison is such an anti-natural place,” Powers says. “So what could be the benefit of nature, healing, and exposure to dirt and hands in the soil?” That’s the question they started with.

Read the full article about horticultural therapy by Stephanie Parker at YES! Magazine.