Yes. Burn Bright is a 508c1a registered with the state of Indiana.

Gasoline. Insurance. Hotel rooms. Equipment. Tables. Tripods. Parables. Books. Tires. Oil Changes. Trips to Walmart in some small town in Missouri to get 3 more things needed for the meeting at the last second.

Cargo trailers and reliable vehicles to pull the trailers to haul everything and the volunteers and staff to the meetings. Certifications and regulatory stuff to meet requirements.

Money for triple hashbrowns smothered, covered and peppered, so that while you’re traveling you can afford to take 5 young people to a waffle house and sit in a booth with them and listen to them talk about their childhoods so they can heal from them.

To pay for discipleship camps for young people and missionaries to encourage them and to buy the groceries needed to feed them and everything else that goes into a camp like that.

Food and expenses of traveling through airports and toll roads and other things like this. There are lots of expenses that add up.

Soap, shampoo, body wash, and hygiene products that are given as a reward to prison inmates who attend and complete a series of meetings. This is a big deal for them. They are super excited and grateful for it.

When I was a child I used to naively think that houses were expensive. But that is probably because I had never built one myself. Then one day someone taught me that behind the walls there were pipes, wires, insulation, fasteners, beams, foundations, framing. And so too there were attics and drains and all sorts of things I didn’t know about. And he taught me that it took all those things to build a good house.

I grew up a lot the moment I realized that a lot of resources goes into doing things right.

It varies by the type of meeting. And a lot of that has to do with how much money and resources are available to do them.

For example, Burn Bright has carefully been developing the prison meetings and the initial meetings are 4 days long and have a certain format, but there has already been developed a longer meeting that will recruit volunteers from local churches to personally connect with the inmates after Burn Bright leaves. This requires several more days to meet with local volunteers and give them basic training about inmates so they are not taken advantage of.

The advanced meetings will contain an additional incentive for the inmates: inmates get a special unique day-long contact visit with their family who get to see them graduate the program and see how good they are doing.

Holding their children in their arms and seeing their family proud of them is a huge thing and will go a long way to them not coming back to prison.

There are also other meetings each year in churches, youth camps and discipleship training. The peak number of meetings in a single year thus far has been 21. But during that year debt was incurred because Burn Bright was helping people who had no way to cover the expenses. Each meeting requires at least several days of travel and setup. So too there is a lot of preparation before time and a lot of clean up and pastoral care afterwards.

Money would enable more and larger meetings to be held.

Burn Bright is currently working with prisons and jails to establish a routine schedule of recurrent meetings around the country.

It depends upon the prison, but a good example of an average-ish prison in Indiana has 2400 inmates.

That’s a lot of people going through the meetings.

Special care is given, where allowed, to visit the dorms and pods in the prison a day before the meetings to stir up an interest in attending as religious meetings are not mandatory. Fun challenges are given to the inmates which makes them want to come.

There are so many inmates in these prisons that sessions often last all day long. One dorm comes and cycles through and then another afterward, sometimes with 5 or 8 sessions a day because they can’t even all fit at once.