W. Bryan Hubbard

Tell us what need you have in your community that we can look to fund.

This is something that needs to be accessible to grassroots organizations.

It needs to be accountable to you as people.

And we need to make sure we're transparent with how we use this money.

But our first job is to listen.

Well, over the course of 20 town halls across the state Tuesday evenings from 6 p.m.

until we wrapped up, what began as a 15-minute technocratic presentation of what this state commission does turned into these meetings.

these mass catharsis events where hundreds of people, thousands over the course of those 20 town halls, poured out the depths of their grief right at our feet.

And after they did, the sum total of their response to us was, we don't think...

that you have the competence or the integrity to do anything that's gonna make a meaningful difference in this life, in our lives.

And we don't expect one cent of this money is gonna make the least bit of difference for us.

At one of these town halls, I heard about a young woman by the name of Tamara.

And the woman who told Tamara's story was a volunteer at a clinic for the survivors of child sexual abuse.

This particular clinic made sure that children received appropriate medical treatment, that they received proper therapeutic counseling, and that they were placed in family circumstances where they could perhaps have a chance to have a decent life.

So this volunteer told about meeting a young woman by the name of Tamara when Tamara was 10 years old, had been horrifically sexually abused by a family member.

Tamara had to have a series of reconstructive surgeries because of how awful it was.

And she said that she worked with Tamara for about two or three years and that she went to her adopted family and

she hadn't been heard from since, and that she assumed that that was, despite how awful her circumstances were when she came through the door, that she managed to get well and go on and have a relatively functional and happy life, as happy as one can to be a survivor of those circumstances.

This same woman said that about 10 years later, she was volunteering at the Perry County Kentucky Detention Center in the county seat of Hazard.

and that she was offering mindfulness and yoga classes to inmates there, just as a volunteer.