Cory Martin Goes to Jail to Change Hearts

Jun 10, 2013 by Derek Pillie

The Elkhart Truth profiled the Elkhart County Jail’s new chaplain, Cory Martin, Friday afternoon. Their story does a great job covering the recent work he did with The Crossing, a faith-based alternative school program that is serving many communities across northern Indiana. What they didn’t cover was his past life as one of the more effective young political operatives in northern Indiana.

I had the pleasure of working with Cory first when he was former Congresman Chris Chocola’s District Director. Later our office wanted to develop a more focused approach to our outreach in Elkhart County and Rep. Chocola had just lost his bid for reelection to now-Senator Joe Donnelley (D-Granger). Fortunately for us Cory came on board and really transformed what we were doing in Elkhart County and really across the district. We started applying some of what he was doing in Elkhart with great success to our efforts in other counties as well.

You may remember in an earlier Open Item I directed you to his wife Shannan’s blog, Flower Patch Farmgirl. Together they make an incredible team, both in terms of parenting their children and contributing to their community. Elkhart County is going to benefit greatly from Cory’s focus and dedication to a cause that does not get enough attention – helping people who are living in incarceration find a way out of their former life.

Keep an eye on Cory and what he’s doing – I’m sure it is going to have a huge impact. For those who catch this early enough and live in the South Bend media market, you might be able to catch him on the radio – he’ll be on Pulse-FM 96.9 at 8 a.m.

In other news, we’ll be publishing the results of our latest Tweet of the Week winner later today. If you somehow missed the national news, former National Security Administration employee Edward Snowden identified himself as the source who leaked information on the NSA intelligence-gathering operations. We’ll have a separate post on this story a bit later today. Also, to prolong the frustration of the resident Purdue fans among our editorial board, the Indiana University baseball team sealed their first appearance in the College World Series and the Big 10’s first trip to the CWS since 1984.

Another item of note – North and South Korea sit down for joint talks for the first time in two years. Upload Liberty has a video from Newsy that discusses the meeting with reaction from South Korean leaders.

Finally, internally we’ve started shaping up our Twitter lists to be a better resource to our contributors and our readers. If you’re on Twitter be sure to follow Hoosier Access and take the time to check out our groups.

As always, if you have any thoughts or news you’d like to share – please use the comment section below to weigh in. If you have a blog post you’d like to contribute to Hoosier Access, just let us know via the contact form and an editor will be in touch with you shortly.