The bottom line: the battle to reduce the reoffending rate

Following the recent publication of our report Reducing Re-offending Through Social Enterprise, Concilium has been working with the National Offender Management Service (NOMS), part of the Ministry of Justice, to deliver a series of regional workshops.

The aim of the workshops was to promote social enterprise to prison and probation service staff. The programme was called ‘Seeing is Believing’ and each event was hosted by a leading social enterprise currently working with offenders or ex-offenders.

We spent the morning of each event at the social enterprise, getting a guided tour and hearing from the staff about what it was set up to do. The afternoon took the form of a workshop run by one of Concilium’s research consultants. With groups of up to 35 people this was certainly an effective way of getting the message across. 

We visited some fantastic social enterprises and heard great stories about the work they are doing with disadvantaged individuals and groups, as well as the valuable services they are offering the community.

The South Shropshire Furniture Scheme in Ludlow has three sites in the town, offering emergency furniture and other household goods for families in crisis, an extensive workshop facility where furniture is refurbished and an up-market shop where high value goods are sold to raise money for their other work.

The Able Project in Wakefield is running a fish farm and growing its own bio fuel, producing vegetables and salad crops with the waste, as well as building a BMX track. The work is delivered by young people as part of an out of school education contract, taking the children most at risk of exclusion and providing outdoor, practical activities alongside lessons in a more informal context.

The Sunlight Development Trust runs a wide range of activities for people in the local community. Their work with prisoners is based on the experience of a prisoner known to the staff who needed help and found that he couldn’t get it from anywhere else.

The people attending the workshops were a combination of staff from prisons, probation services and the regional Directors of Offender Management (DOM) teams. 

Some of them had previous experience of interacting with third sector organisations but the aim of these events was to help them understand ways of working specific to social enterprises. 

The afternoon sessions delivered by Concilium placed the specific morning examples in a wider context.  Sessions were based on the research report findings, the policy context in which social enterprises operate and the different types of social enterprises that the delegates might encounter, such as co-operatives, social firms or development trusts.

The particular combination of theory and practice, passion and a solid evidence base, certainly seemed to work, with 97 per cent of delegates saying that the day was fully or mostly helpful in increasing their knowledge of social enterprise.

Concilium is a consortium of which The Guild is a founder member. Its report Reducing Re-offending Through Social Enterprise was commissioned by NOMS (National Offender Management Service) and the Social Enterprise Coalition.

The Guild was founded by Nicky Stevenson in 1991 and has developed into a leading support organisation within the voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors.

• Download the full report below.