Ruby Graves Reed, MS '78

Following her calling

Nurse. Prison volunteer. Radio host. Choir director. Vegetarianism advocate. These activities sound disparate, but one person’s caring links them all. Sister Ruby Graves, M.S. ’78, is a full-time volunteer, giving her efforts to a range of causes with which she’s been involved for many years.

It all started after she worked as a missionary nurse ministering to patients in a Nigerian medical-surgical hospital and at a leprosarium in Sierra Leone. She later returned to the States, to Colorado, to get her undergraduate degree in nursing and work with youth. During that period, she wrote an article for The Message Magazine on her Africa experiences. An inmate in a state penitentiary read the piece and invited her to conduct chapel services. She agreed and ultimately began a volunteer prison ministry.

Then UB called, asking Graves if she would consider enrolling in the master’s degree program in nursing. She initially turned down the offer, Graves remembers: “I wanted to keep working with the youth. But my father convinced me to attend, and I’m glad he did because it was the best education.”

Thus, Graves returned to Western New York. While enrolled at UB, she also held a part-time job doing private-duty nursing and continued volunteering in the prison ministry.

“It was very difficult, especially getting up early in the morning,” she says, laughing. After Graves received her master’s degree, she taught in a Christian college in Nebraska. After she came back to Amherst, N.Y. and got married, her volunteer activities grew. Graves began working with the homeless and needy, halfway-house residents and pregnant women, and in a prison ministry.

Reaching out through radio

Today she focuses on two key efforts. Though the prison ministry was clearly valuable, getting around to all the prisons in the region was challenging. So in 1997, she began a radio broadcast on WUFO-AM 1080 called the Bible Truth Prison Ministry. The program runs every Sunday at 10 a.m. Segments range from preaching and chapel services, to music, bilingual (English and Spanish) health advice and featured guests like the state comptroller and dean of UB’s School of Nursing.

The goal for the prison ministry is for inmates “to do better,” Graves says, “to get out and stay out.”

Graves also produces a 15-minute segment immediately before Bible Truth Prison Ministry called Abundant Health. Topics range from vegetarian cooking to health issues, such as dementia. Says Graves, herself a strict vegetarian, “We want to educate people to stay healthy, doing it a vegetarian way.”

Graves’ other avocation is leading Jesus’ Little Lambs, a children’s choir that sings and signs in five languages – English, Spanish, French, Latin and Yoruba. Her goal with the seven children in the choir, says Graves, is to “motivate them to do well – good, better, best, never let it rest until your good is better, and your better is best. We want each and every one to do well, go to college and stay out of prison, be good citizens and not get into trouble.”

Heavenly goal

Graves emphasizes that the “ultimate goal” for the inmates and children “is heaven.” Her work, however, has received some rewards here on earth. Among her personal awards are the Martin Luther King, Jr., Award from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Buffalo chapter, Special U.S. Congressional Recognition for Community Service and, for the Bible Truth Prison Ministry, the Adventists Prison Ministries Association National Award of Excellence.

Like most volunteer efforts, the prison ministry and children’s choir both are in great need of funding. The children – many from the inner city – have done so well in their performances that she’d like to have a formal dinner to show her appreciation: “I’m hoping we can get a hotel or restaurant to sponsor that.”

More important, perhaps, are her efforts to motivate the kids to get grades of B and higher: “If any of them succeed,” she says, “we’d like to find someone to sponsor them through college.” Graves is also searching for funding to provide Bibles to inmates. “Once you give an inmate a Bible,” she says, “you don’t want to take it back.” Any donation to the Bible Truth Prison Ministry or Jesus’ Little Lambs, she notes, “are tax deductible.”

If you would like to learn more, contact Sister Ruby Graves at P.O. Box 364, Williamsville, N.Y., 14231-0364 or call (716) 834-1080.

Written by Grace Lazzara
January 2005

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