The Herald Bulletin - A band of brothers

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THB photo/John P. Cleary 2/18/09 COMM Man 4 Man Ministries helps prinsoners when they get out. Tony Canaday, chairman of the board of directors, confers with Bobby Cotton, a small group leader for the organization.
John P. Cleary /

THB photo/John P. Cleary 2/18/09 COMM Man 4 Man Ministries helps prinsoners when they get out. Bob Blume is Man 4 Man founder and executive director.
John P. Cleary /

THB photo/John P. Cleary 2/18/09 COMM Man 4 Man Ministries helps prinsoners when they get out.
John P. Cleary /

THB photo/John P. Cleary 2/18/09 COMM Man 4 Man Ministries helps prinsoners when they get out. This banner hangs on the wall in their meeting room.
John P. Cleary /

Published February 27, 2009 04:39 pm - ANDERSON — Life on the streets: Crack cocaine. Using. Dealing. Always looking over your shoulder. Sleepless nights — too busy making connections.
The lucky ones are caught.

A band of brothers
Man4Man Ministries gives second chance to former inmates

By Karen Thurber

For The Herald Bulletin

ANDERSON — Life on the streets: Crack cocaine. Using. Dealing. Always looking over your shoulder. Sleepless nights — too busy making connections.

The lucky ones are caught.

Enter Bob Blume, founder and executive director of Man4Man Ministries, which gives convicted felons a chance to choose productive lives.

“It’s unbelievable how many lives he has changed, people who were given up on. Through Bob’s programming and the people who are involved with him, he has performed miracles,” Judge Thomas Newman Jr. said.

Shannon Swain, a former inmate, lost jobs, family and a nice home.

“The downfalls of being in a life like that is that it happens way before you really recognize what’s going on,” he said. “Through Man4Man Ministries I have been able to use the gift and the talent that I never thought I had in me. God showed me that you are worth something to me.”

Swain is now a commercial contractor and an ordained minister through Lighthouse Family Worship Center.

A person’s choice of habits leads to a choice of friends and those friends lead him to places that can be destructive, Blume said.

The recidivism rate, or rate at which offenders return to incarceration, was 37.8 percent in 2007, according to the Indiana Department of Correction. According to Blume, the recidivism rate in Man4-Man is less than 2 percent.

“What you’re around is what you become, so we have to change their environments,” Blume said.

Blume asked Tony Canaday to help set up Man4Man Ministries in 2001. Canaday now chairs the board of directors.

“It’s the only job I’ve ever had where I have to pay to go to work,” Blume said.