It was just a typical Friday morning until out of the blue Sr Nelly León Correa received a WhatsApp message from the United Arab Emirates asking her to join a Zoom meeting.

The message was from Mohamed Abdelsalam, the Secretary-General of the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity whom she had met in Abu Dhabi the year before. During the meeting, he talked about the awards ceremony and invited her to the event. However, it was only at the end of the conversation that he let her know that she had been named as co-honoree for the award for 2024.

Standing in the rundown corridors of the women’s prison in Santiago, Chile, tears of joy streamed down her face. “There I was, in a tiny corner of the world, and someone from the Middle East recognized the mission we carry out here in the prison”, Sr. Nelly described during an interview with the Congregational Communications Office in Rome.

Sr. Nelly’s journey with the Congregation began in 1982 when she met an Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd novice who gave her a book on the life of Saint Mary Euphrasia. “When I read about her life”, she says, “I was convinced that I wanted to follow in the footsteps of this woman and continue to make her mission alive”.

In those days, the Congregation was responsible for three large prisons in Chile, and as a postulant, Sr. Nelly carried out her ministry experience in the prison at Santiago. This was her first experience of working with women in prison but during that year the direction of her journey became clear to her.

This was a life’s journey that eventually led Sr. Nelly to found the Mujer Levántate Foundation in Chile which offers support and training to women during their detention and helps them reintegrate into society once released from prison. Having spent 25 years working with the women, she has fondly come to be known as ‘Mother Nelly’ and it is for this work that she is being honored with the award. The foundation achieves excellent outcomes with nearly 94 percent of program participants remaining free of convictions two years after leaving prison.

Such is her love for the women that during the Covid pandemic, she received permission to remain in the prison with them. “My heart was spurned for the women to know that they were loved unconditionally without judgment on the errors they may have committed. I felt compelled to make them aware of their dignity, to let them know that someone had chosen to be there with them, accompanying them during those uncertain times”.

During those 18 months of quarantine, Sr. Nelly’s vocation was strengthened and she became ever more sure that she was called for this purpose. “We all sought to look after ourselves and protect our lives but I realized that to care for myself, I had to care for others and take care of others”, she described.

As an organization that survives entirely on donations and fundraising activities, Sr. Nelly and her team are relieved that the half-a-million-dollar prize fund awarded to the foundation will secure its future and offer exciting new opportunities. “We want to improve the quality of life of the women in the prison,” she explained,” by making some small renovations and then seek to insert the project in other cities in Chile”.

Following the ceremony on February 5, 2024, at the Founder’s Memorial in Abu Dhabi, Sr. Nelly made a visit to the Congregational Leadership Team in Rome. She also met with ambassadors from across Latin America at the Chilean Embassy to the Holy See. At that meeting, she offered to share the blueprint for the project and the team’s know-how so that their unique work can be replicated in other countries across Latin America and achieve positive outcomes for women across the region. Yet, she shared how she’s also willing to “share our learnings with others in the Congregation so that the project can be implemented wherever sisters or partners-in-mission identify the need”.

Sr. Nelly spoke of how these past seven weeks have been an emotional whirlwind of excitement and how she feels that her feet “still haven’t touched the ground”. However, on returning home to her community and ministry with the women in Chile she describes something very beautiful that happened to her: “I realized that what took place was a wonderful experience but it is not my world, I belong here, in my world, in my community, in my ministry. This is what fulfils me and gives me purpose – this is what makes me happy”.