HOPE & HELP
FOR VICTIMS OF CRIME
How do you help Victims of Crime
Serving and protecting victims of crime is our top priority. We believe that the very best thing we can do for victims of crime is to try to correct whatever thinking and/or behaviors led to the crime that was committed against them and try to eliminate or reduce future victimization.
We also recognize that victims of crime do not feel that they are being served well the way the justice system is currently functioning.
connecting victims of crime with the offender...
Why would anyone want to meet with the person who committed a crime against them or someone they love?
I have personally witnessed and have also heard others’ stories of the healing that comes when a victim of crime talks with the person who committed the offense.
This is a very personal decision that each person should consider carefully.
Hope
The untapped resource
Hope is an untapped resource because it behaves like one—renewable, transformative, and high-leverage—yet most systems we build when alone are designed to mine scarcity, not cultivate abundance. We treat hope as a feeling to be managed rather than a capacity to be developed, which leaves it largely unexploited.
Here is why it sits idle:
1. It is invisible. Unlike capital, labor, or data, hope leaves no audit trail. You cannot collateralize it, tax it, or put it on a balance sheet. Because it resists quantification, organizations optimize for what they can measure and ignore what they cannot. A factory runs on hours and wages; it has no line item for the hope that might make those hours more inventive.
2. It is mistaken for naivety. In risk-averse cultures, hope is often conflated with optimism or delusion. The prudent stance is framed as "realism" or "preparedness for the worst." This creates a selection bias: people who express hope in professional or civic contexts are read as unserious, so hope gets driven underground. It still exists, but it is no longer actionable.
3. It requires a substrate of agency. Hope is not wishful thinking; it is the belief that specific actions can lead to specific outcomes. When systems strip away agency—through bureaucracy, inequality, or learned helplessness—hope cannot attach to anything. It atrophies not because people are cynical, but because the bridge between effort and outcome has been dismantled. The resource is present, but there is no pump to extract it.
4. It compounds slowly. Hope pays returns on a timeline that markets and election cycles do not reward. A hopeful community invests in education, infrastructure, and relationships that mature over decades. A fearful community hoards, fortifies, and discounts the future. Because our incentive structures favor quarterly results, hope is underinvested in.
5. It is non-zero-sum, which makes it unprofitable to gatekeep. Unlike oil or attention, my hope does not diminish yours. In fact, it tends to amplify it. This makes hope a terrible commodity. There is no competitive moat in selling it, so no one builds the infrastructure to distribute it at scale.
The result is that hope accumulates unevenly—in tight-knit communities, in subcultures, in individuals who have accidentally preserved it—while the broader economy runs on anxiety, which is easier to monetize. The untapped quality is not that hope is rare; it is that we have built almost no tools to refine it, channel it, or protect it from contamination by fear.
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