The Forgiveness Project has been fortunate to attract much recognition and praise over its eight years in existence but fundraising for the organisation isn’t easy, and never more so than in these financially challenging times.

Despite this work being hard to quantify and measure, we continue to receive a huge amount of evidence that demonstrates again and again that this work is transformative and changes lives. More than 500 visitors each day go to our website, and over 150,000 people have seen our exhibitions worldwide, all accessing resources that help resolve pain and conflict. Our award-winning RESTORE prison programme continues to help rehabilitate prisoners, and our schools’ resource, currently in production, will educate young people about peaceful solutions to conflict.

However, to continue this work we need your help. To assist us in what is a challenging time for fundraising, we have developed a tiered ‘Supporters Programme.’ The programme will invite those who wish to support us to pay an annual fee to become a Friend, Guardian or Ambassador of The Forgiveness Project.

There are three levels of support that people can sign up to, starting at £60 or US$96 per year (just £5 or $8 a month).

Become a Friend of The Forgiveness Project: £60 – £299 per year
Become a Guardian of The Forgiveness Project: £300 – £2999 per year
Become an Ambassador of The Forgiveness Project: £3000 + per year

(To use other currencies please go to http://www.xe.com/ucc/)

As a way of showing our sincere appreciation, everyone who signs up for the programme will be named on The Forgiveness Project website as a funder, as well as in our new literature, currently being written and produced. There will also be offers of discounted tickets to our events. For our Guardians and Ambassadors there will be special events, as well as the opportunity to offer strategic advice on the work of the charity, and the chance to participate in one of our award-winning prison workshops.

We know the work The Forgiveness Project does is transformative, and that every person who engages with the charity and its resources is moved and challenged. We are already fortunate to have a large amount of dedicated and wonderful supporters. If you wish to join the programme and contribute to this pioneering charity please contact simon@theforgivenessproject.com or click here.

Finally, we would like to say a heartfelt thank you to all those who have helped fund our work since the project was founded in 2004.

Wishing all our friends and supporters a happy and peaceful 2012.

Marina

There is something mysterious and deeply rewarding about reading a book which perfectly and beautifully sums up an internal dialogue that you’ve been having with yourself for years. As founder and director of The Forgiveness Project, I’ve been exposed to many theories and analyses on the meaning of forgiveness, but nothing has been presented to me with such clarity and eloquence as Healing Agony: Re-Imagining Forgiveness – a refreshing and thorough interpretation of this complex and often most excruciating of subjects by Stephen Cherry..

What I love about this book is that Cherry refuses to box forgiveness. While exploring the various debates around the limits of forgiveness, he won’t be drawn into defining a word that is in danger of becoming cheapened by simple explanations. His book is a welcome antidote to a growing movement which perpetuates what Cherry describes as the “idealized myth of forgiveness” – a movement which promotes forgiveness as a panacea for all ills and thus creates a social and moral imperative around something that is deeply personal, always different, and should be free of obligation and guilt.

There are no simple answers in this book and the more you delve into what forgiveness is and what it isn’t, the less you find yourself able to pin it down. As Cherry states, forgiveness has become “the most impossible but the most important” word in our vocabulary. After reading this book, you won’t come away with a single, simplified idea of what forgiveness is, but you will have gained real insight into why people choose to forgive and the progression of what Cherry calls the “forgiving heart”. You will also most certainly come away with a deeper appreciation of why forgiveness is difficult, painful and risky, but also why – in its ability to heal – it is potentially transformative.

While Healing Agony is aimed at Christians searching for a deeper understanding of the true nature of forgiveness, it is nonetheless relevant to everyone, and, as a non-Christian myself, Healing Agony is about the best book to date I’ve read on the subject. Indeed, it’s very rare for me to reach the end of a book and want to start all over again but with Healing Agony I did just that – knowing that on the second reading I would discover even more layers in this subtle, nuanced and most surprising of topics.

to read the first two chapters of Healing Agony click here

David Rogers with wife Pat and his late son Adam

In May 2009, at the age of 24, Adam Rogers moved back to his parents’ home in Blackburn. One Saturday evening, just after his parents had left for a two week holiday in Malta, Adam got punched in the head while protecting his friend from a random attack. He died in intensive care the following day. Just over two years later Adam’s father, David Rogers, met Billy – the 16-year-old who had killed his son.

It was six o’clock in the morning when the phone went in Malta. It was Adam’s younger brother Jamie calling from the hospital telling us Adam had been attacked and was very seriously injured. We managed to get the only flight back, and were at the hospital by lunchtime. Adam was in critical care, and looked so peaceful, as if he could wake up at any moment. It was very hard.

The medical staff had waited for us to get back to do any final tests. When they’d done the tests they told us there was no brain activity, and that he was just being kept alive by machines.

[Donate]

We knew immediately we were in a very dark place and that we had to do something positive, or this would destroy us. The first thing that happened was that the doctors asked us if we would speak to the transplant team, and I remembered Adam filling in his first application for a drivers license and saying he would want to be a donor. It was our first chance to ensure that something good came from Adam’s death.

Over the next few days we started to think of ways to channel our anger and grief into something that could do some good. We felt it was important to try and get a message across to young people that incidents like the one that led to Adam’s death are senseless and avoidable. We decided that we would use Adam’s story as the basis of an education package and we called our campaign ‘Every Action Has Consequences’.

More or less at the same time I came to a very personal decision. Straight after Adam died I told the Police that I wanted to meet the boy – Billy – who had hit him. I needed to confront Adam’s attacker. I wanted him to know how angry I was at the way he had behaved that night. I also wanted him to know the added pain he had caused us by pleading not guilty and painting a picture of Adam that wasn’t true.

While Billy had admitted straight away he’d punched Adam, he also said Adam had threatened him. In Court he denied it was manslaughter, and claimed he acted in self-defence. This only added to our anger and grief, because everyone who knew Adam knew he had never been in a fight in his life.

When I first asked to meet Billy I didn’t hold out much hope that he’d agree. But as the news began to filter through about the progress he was making in prison, I learned that he now wanted to meet me in order to apologise. I wrote to him before we met, and he wrote back saying he was willing to answer any questions I had. This was important to me because as well as confronting him, there were questions I wanted to ask about things that hadn’t come out at the trial. I wanted to understand why anyone could ever feel threatened by Adam?

The restorative justice meeting took place in the prison while Billy was still serving his sentence and it gave me the opportunity to confront Billy with the impact his actions had had not only on all the family but also on Adam’s friends, especially those who were with him that night. I think that surprised him, as he hadn’t thought about the wider consequences.

It was very important to me that Billy knew who Adam was, because that hadn’t really come out at the trial. So I took photographs along and told him about how Adam had lived his life. After the meeting, I felt I understood much more about what exactly had happened that night which was very helpful in that it diffused the anger. I can now think about Billy without getting angry, and that makes a difference.

Someone once said to me: to understand everything is to forgive everything and I do believe understanding is very important. I think we are beholden to try to understand as much as we can because you can’t make a proper judgment about anything unless you do.

There are some people who find it hard to understand why I wanted to meet Billy. There is still a lot of anger around among friends and family, but everyone, whatever their personal views, agrees that Adam would have wanted me to do this. Adam always looked for the best in people.

I hope the meeting has had a positive effect on Billy. I hope it’s helped him to face up to his responsibility in what happened, and to put his life back together. My wife and I both said after the trial, Adam’s life is gone, but we don’t want to see another life ruined.

David Rogers with wife Pat and his late son Adam

In May 2009, at the age of 24, Adam Rogers moved back to his parents’ home in Blackburn. One Saturday evening, just after his parents had left for a two week holiday in Malta, Adam got punched in the head protecting his friend from a random attack. He died in intensive care the following day. Just over two years later Adam’s father, David Rogers, met Billy – the 16-year-old who had killed his son.

It was six o’clock in the morning when the phone went in Malta. It was Adam’s younger brother Jamie calling from the hospital telling us Adam had been attacked and was very seriously injured. We managed to get the only flight back, and were at the hospital by lunchtime. Adam was in critical care, and looked so peaceful, as if he could wake up at any moment. It was very hard.

The medical staff had waited for us to get back to do any final tests. When they’d done the tests they told us there was no brain activity, and that he was just being kept alive by machines.

We knew immediately we were in a very dark place and that we had to do something positive, or this would destroy us. The first thing that happened was that the doctors asked us if we would speak to the transplant team, and I remembered Adam filling in his first application for a drivers license and saying he would want to be a donor. It was our first chance to ensure that something good came from Adam’s death.

Over the next few days we started to think of ways to channel our anger and grief into something that could do some good. We felt it was important to try and get a message across to young people that incidents like the one that led to Adam’s death are senseless and avoidable. We decided that we would use Adam’s story as the basis of an education package and we called our campaign ‘Every Action Has Consequences’.

More or less at the same time I came to a very personal decision. Straight after Adam died I told the Police that I wanted to meet the boy – Billy – who had hit him. I needed to confront Adam’s attacker. I wanted him to know how angry I was at the way he had behaved that night. I also wanted him to know the added pain he had caused us by pleading not guilty and painting a picture of Adam that wasn’t true.

While Billy had admitted straight away he’d punched Adam, he also said Adam had threatened him. In Court he denied it was manslaughter, and claimed he acted in self-defence. This only added to our anger and grief, because everyone who knew Adam knew he had never been in a fight in his life.

When I first asked to meet Billy I didn’t hold out much hope that he’d agree. But as the news began to filter through about the progress he was making in prison, I learned that he now wanted to meet me in order to apologise. I wrote to him before we met, and he wrote back saying he was willing to answer any questions I had. This was important to me because as well as confronting him, there were questions I wanted to ask about things that hadn’t come out at the trial. I wanted to understand why anyone could ever feel threatened by Adam?

The restorative justice meeting took place in the prison while Billy was still serving his sentence and it gave me the opportunity to confront Billy with the impact his actions had had not only on all the family but also on Adam’s friends, especially those who were with him that night. I think that surprised him, as he hadn’t thought about the wider consequences.

It was very important to me that Billy knew who Adam was, because that hadn’t really come out at the trial. So I took photographs along and told him about how Adam had lived his life. After the meeting, I felt I understood much more about what exactly had happened that night which was very helpful in that it diffused the anger. I can now think about Billy without getting angry, and that makes a difference.

Someone once said to me: to understand everything is to forgive everything and I do believe understanding is very important. I think we are beholden to try to understand as much as we can because you can’t make a proper judgment about anything unless you do.

There are some people who find it hard to understand why I wanted to meet Billy. There is still a lot of anger around among friends and family, but everyone, whatever their personal views, agrees that Adam would have wanted me to do this. Adam always looked for the best in people.

I hope the meeting has had a positive effect on Billy. I hope it’s helped him to face up to his responsibility in what happened, and to put his life back together. My wife and I both said after the trial, Adam’s life is gone, but we don’t want to see another life ruined.

The Forgiveness Project has made some important changes to the website. Crucially we have redesigned the Get Involved and Donate pages. Please take a moment to take a look around and see how much easier we have made it for you to literally get involved. As well as simply making a donation, you can join our new Supporters’ Programme, sponsor one of our projects or even host an event to raise money.

We’ve also added a feature on the Home page where you can keep up to date with the latest prison news and the Director’s blog. Our prison work remains a key part of the work we do at TFP and these regular updates (which will start soon) will report on the prisons where we’ve worked and how recent courses have gone.

Thank you for your continued support.

On a cold night in November 12, 2004 six teenagers in Ronkonkoma, New York bought a 20 pound turkey with a stolen credit card. While driving on Sunrise Highway, 18 year-old Ryan Cushing threw the frozen bird out the back window just for a thrill. The turkey hit Victoria Ruvolo’s car, shattering the windshield and smashed into her face. She was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. She awoke several weeks later with no knowledge of what had happened.

When I looked in the mirror, I could see it was me but my whole face was smashed in and every single bone in my face was broken. I had no idea I’d had ten hours of surgery and I was shocked when the doctors told me that from now on, for the rest of my life, I would always have three titanium plates in my left cheek, one in my right cheek, and I’d also have a wire mesh holding my left eye in place because my left eye socket was so badly shattered.

Once I got off the medication, I remember lying in the bedroom at my sister’s house and just crying myself to sleep and asking: Why me God? What did I ever do so wrong and so terrible in my life that I deserved all this to happen to me? And I’d cry myself to sleep. But then, gradually, it began to dawn on me that perhaps God had allowed me to live through this ordeal because I was in such great physical condition. The idea that it had happened for a reason – and that I had saved someone else who might not have been able to survive – helped me get through rehabilitation.

Then the District Attorney informed me that the other teenagers who had been with Ryan had entered a plea bargain to testify against him. This, coupled with overwhelming evidence, was enough to put Ryan in jail for 25 years. It was at this point that I started asking questions about Ryan. I wanted to know what type of kid would do this? Had he always been a bully? Was he always hurting other people? What could possibly have built up inside him so bad that he had to throw something so hard? Because I’d experienced the death of two brothers when I was much younger, I felt strongly that I didn’t want be responsible for taking this other young person’s life. I didn’t want Ryan to rot in jail.

That’s when I asked to meet with Ryan’s lawyer to be able to tell him that I wanted an amnesty for Ryan or at least a lesser sentence.

On the day we went to court, I saw this young man walk in wearing a suit which looked like it was three times too big for him; it made him seem so frail. He walked in with his head hung down and looked so upset with himself. When I saw him there, my heart went out to him. To me he looked like a lost soul.

Once the case was over and it was time for him to walk out, he started veering over towards where I was sitting and every court officer was ready to jump on him. They had no idea why he was coming towards me but as he walked over to where I was sitting and stood in front of me, I saw that all he was doing was crying, crying profusely. He looked at me and said, ‘I never meant this to happen to you, I prayed for you every day. I’m so glad you’re doing well.’ Then this motherly instinct just came over me and all I could do was take him and cuddle him like a child and tell him ‘just do something good with your life, take this experience and do something good with your life.’

Because I asked for amnesty for Ryan, he received a six-month prison sentence with five years probation of community service and psychiatric help. Some people couldn’t understand why I’d done this but I felt God had given me a second chance and I wanted to pass it on. I know I did the right thing. Kids like Ryan don’t think about what they do. They think they’re invincible and everything will be OK. They don’t think about how every action has a reaction.

For his community service Ryan was directed to speak to youth in a program that, Robert Goldman, JD, Psy.D., supervising psychologist for the Suffolk County Probation Department, created. When he finished his one year of community service Ryan volunteered to continue for another three years. Victoria is now working with Dr. Goldman speaking to youth about the importance of forgiveness. They have recently co-authored a book titled, “No Room For Vengeance in Justice and Healing”.

This is the story of how I deeply wounded the person I have loved most in my life by making some really poor decisions, and how I have lived differently since.

In May of 2005, on a picturesque hillside in the Lake District of northern England, with sheep bleating in the pasture below, I married the girl that I believed was the love of my life.  Our relationship had been founded on a sincere friendship, tested in the waters of sorrow over the tragic loss of a mutual friend, and our coming together was heralded by our friends as seemingly “divinely appointed.”

We had not been married for six months before I returned to some habits I hadn’t practiced since before we had even started dating.  Though I did not know it at the time, I was in the early stages of a brutal but subtle addiction to lust, primarily through the avenue of internet pornography.  I had told my wife about my struggles with lust in my past- how I had discovered, perused, and abused pornography through high school and college, and had patronized some sordid clubs in the last year during my bout with depression over the sudden death of our friend.  I told her everything was going to be okay, however, because I myself was convinced that those days were long gone and that anyway married life would put a swift end to my carousing.

As one “slip” turned into three and then four, I could feel myself losing control.  I would climb into bed in the evening, after a late night of “studying,” and slip in next to this girl, sleeping peacefully, who I genuinely loved as much as I knew how, and would lay awake for hours in unbelief of what I had just done, as the adrenaline slowly faded from my nerves.  I considered myself devoutly religious and concerned about my actions before God, and this hypocrisy, as I see it was now, proved to be a huge stumbling block to my recovery.  We attended a small Christian university and both enjoyed reputations of leadership and respect.  So it was cowardice that made me first lie when she asked if I had struggled with lust since our wedding.  I was afraid; afraid that I would lose respect in her eyes and my reputation.  A few weeks later I came clean, and then had to witness her broken hearted tears as I promised to change.  That first lie would set the precedent for a pattern that became all too familiar in our marriage: slipping, getting caught, promising, lying, slipping, getting caught….

I have no idea when I crossed that fateful line, but at some point seeking out personal ads online.  It started with a curiosity, just to see if there were real women on the other side and not automated responses from some seedy website.  The first response I got was like a dose of dopamine I had not previously experienced and made me high.  From there my problem grew into obsessive thinking and daydreaming, compulsively checking my email, and eventually posting my own ads.  Simultaneously with this new addiction, I discovered massage parlors, and now had a way to get my dopamine that I was sure wouldn’t qualify as adultery, since there was no real sex involved.  Unfortunately this habit required that I come up with extra money, and so I became a thief as well – a thief, who stole from my own paycheck in small enough amounts so my wife never caught on.

This whole time we were living in New York and my wife was in school, in an intensive program, trying to keep her head above water and enjoy the city life with her husband, whom she loved and admired. Of course I was eventually caught.  After spending some $4,000 on my habit, meeting up with two anonymous women, and wasting hundreds of hours in fruitless pursuit of possibilities, my amatory chimera crumbled in my hands.  I will never forget the look on my wife’s face.  She didn’t know who I was anymore, like I had been wearing a mask our whole marriage.  In a desperate attempt to save my relationship, I entered a 12-step program for lust addiction, but I was sicker than I realized, and underestimated what recovery required.  After a year of moderate success, based mainly on fear of reprisal, I slipped again, perusing a personals site for possibilities, and I got caught.  Believing that I had done much more than simply surf a few sites, my wife responded quickly by moving out.  A couple of weeks later she read me the reasons why she was divorcing me.

The next day I left for a monastery a few hours away- with my life in my hands, I had to find God or die trying.  While I was there I felt led to do a few things: quit my job (which I had loved), fast for forty days to try and gain some clarity, and throw myself headlong into recovery, no matter what the cost.  I spent a year working at a grocery store, going to church whenever the doors were open, volunteering my extra time to help others, and praying and meditating for sometimes hours a day.  I didn’t get my wife back, but I got something better, my soul and some inner peace.  When she left me I thought my life was over, and I still cry from time to time, but I have forgiven her for giving up on me, premature though it may have been, for I know I looked hopeless. I am learning to forgive myself too, though at times that is the hardest part of all; I know that God doesn’t judge me, so how can I?  Now I am back at my old job, moving forward with my life, and trying to continue to live differently from the person I have been, sharing my story with others, and trying to pass on the message of healing and forgiveness that I have experienced.  I am convinced that forgiveness is the key, a divine key that can turn ashes into beauty.  There is always hope; no one is a lost cause.

From the age of 17 Arno Michaels was deeply involved in the white power movement. He was a founding member of what became the largest racist skinhead organization in the world, a Reverend of self-declared Racial Holy War, and lead singer of the race-metal band Centurion, selling over 20,000 CDS to racists round the world. He now works with a group of former US gang members and white supremacists to produce Life After Hate, a monthly online magazine dedicated to basic human goodness, and has developed Kindness Not Weakness, a character development movement which addresses bullying and other destructive behaviour. In 2010 he published his memoir Life After Hate.

I grew up in an alcoholic household where emotional violence was the norm and as a kid who was told I could achieve anything, I reacted to that emotional violence by lashing out and hurting people. I started out as the bully on the school bus, and by the time I was in middle school I was committing serious acts of vandalism.

As a teenager I got into the punk rock scene which for a while was the ultimate outlet for my aggression. But, like any other addiction, my thrill seeking needed constant cranking up, so when I encountered racist skinheads I knew I’d found something far more effective. I joined up for the kicks and to make people angry.

I was also enamoured with the idea of being a warrior, and as a skinhead, here at last was my chance to be a warrior for a magnificent cause – to save the white race! I truly believed white people were under threat of genocide at the hands of some shadowy Jewish conspiracy. It made total sense to me, probably because nothing else in my world was making sense.

So I assumed an identity where all that mattered was the colour of my skin. I remember one Thanksgiving dinner, when I was very vehemently and drunkenly spouting off my views, my mother said to me, ‘Well, Mr Nazi, did you know that you’re one-sixteenth Indian?’ That completely shut me up right there and then, but later that night I went back to my own house and continued to drink beer out of glass bottles – until I broke a bottle and slit my wrist with it. That’s how convinced I was that my racial identity was all I had.

Once I’d stepped down this path, violence became a self-fulfilling prophecy so the more violence and hatred I put into the world, the more the world gave it back to me, which of course only further validated all my paranoia and conspiracy theories. I wallowed in violence as a means of self-destruction and stimulation. Using white power ideology as justification and profuse alcohol abuse as a spiritual anaesthetic, I practiced violence until it seemed natural, becoming very proficient in aggression. With my bare hands, I beat other human beings to the point of hospitalization over the color of their skin, their sexuality, or simply just for the adrenaline rush. Kids trying to emulate me did much worse.

It wasn’t until I became a single parent at age 24 that I began to distance myself from the movement. I’d lost a number of friends to either prison or a violent death by now and it started to occur to me that if I didn’t change my ways then street violence would take me from my daughter too. And once I began to distance myself from the constant reinforcement of violence and hatred, suddenly it began to make much less sense to me. At the same time I began to feel I had an identity of my own – and so for the first time I allowed myself to listen to whatever music I wanted to listen to, and watch whatever TV shows I wanted to watch – not just what had been approved by the white power movement.

Soon I got immersed in the rave scene, which couldn’t have been more different from the skinhead scene. While there was still a lot of drug use and irresponsible behaviour, there was also a lot of forgiveness. I was embraced and accepted by people who formerly I would have attacked on sight, and that was a very powerful thing for me. But it took me a long time to work through my feelings of guilt and remorse for the harm I’d caused.

I had effectively been on a ten year bender but once I quit drinking in 2004, I felt the need to really make a positive impact and speak out publicly against racism and hatred. In 2007 I began writing a reflective memoir and co-founded the online magazine Life After Hate.

When I was younger I thought I had created my challenge by declaring war on the world but I’ve come to realise that responding to aggression with compassion is much, much more difficult than to respond to it with anger and violence.

Forgiveness is a sublime example of humanity that I explore at every opportunity, because it was the unconditional forgiveness I was given by people who I once claimed to hate that demonstrated for me the way from there to here.

On 12 and 13th November 2011, The Forgiveness Project with support from the Metropolitan Police presented UNPROVOKED at The Roundhouse theatre in Camden. Written by Kathrine Smith and directed by Emily Momoh and Angus Scott-Miller, this short but powerful portrait of girl-on-girl knife crime was based on the experience of Mary Foley whose 15-year-old daughter was murdered by another girl at an East London party in 2005. The play examines the impact of teenage bullying, and traces the path of a bereaved mother’s journey towards reconciliation.

This is the first time The Forgiveness Project has been directly involved with dramatizing the story of someone like Mary – one of our real-life story-tellers who on numerous occasions has shared her journey in prisons and schools and opened up so many young people to the possibility of forgiveness and alternatives to violence.

The Roundhouse performance was Mary’s first chance to see the play and those of us who know her well were naturally anxious about how she would feel watching the story of her daughter’s murder unfold before her eyes, hearing her own words spoken so poignantly by actress Lorna Gayle. However,as Mary said: “as long as my experience and journey helps someone, then every tear and hurt is worth it and Charlotte’s death will not have been in vain.”

At the panel discussions afterwards, many members of the audience expressed a real desire to see UNPROVOKED used as a learning tool for groups at risk of gang and youth violence. With this in mind we are now working towards producing a DVD which we hope will be shown in prisons, schools and community settings.

On 6th October we held our second annual at Union Chapel, Islington to an audience of 500 people. The lecture ‘No Forgiveness Without Justice?’ was delivered by Clare Short, MP for Birmingham Ladywood 1983-2010 and Secretary of State for International Development 1997-2003.

Chaired by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of The Independent, Clare Short’s lecture was preceded by three story-tellers – Colin Parry, who lost his son in the IRA Warrington bomb in 1993, and two speakers from The Forgiveness Project: Elizabeth Turner, whose husband was killed while at a business meeting in the World Trade Centre on 11th September 2001, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian whose 10-year-old daughter was killed by an Israeli soldier and who is a founding member of Combatants for Peace.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT FORGIVENESS AND JUSTICE ON THE DIRECTOR’S BLOG