Clinks is a member organisation supporting the voluntary sector working in the Criminal Justice System. Our members are very important to us and help shape our priorities by telling us how things are where they work. The information that gets fed back to us affects what areas we focus on and allows us to better represent the sector to government and decision makers.
We’ve worked with members a lot in 2016, so we’d like to let you know what we’ve done on four of the key issues you have raised.
Thank you for being a member of Clinks. We really appreciate your support and we look forward to continuing to work with you in the future. Please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any comments, queries or suggestions for the future.
Anne Fox
Chief Executive Officer, Clinks
State of the Sector
Our members’ voices are essential to understanding how the sector looks and what challenges it faces, so thank you to the 125 of you who responded to our State of the Sector 2016 survey. We found that exploring new funding sources is a major priority for many organisations, so we have arranged a 50% discount off the DSC Directory of Grant Making Trusts for our members, and have presented the findings of the report to trusts and foundations to better inform them about your needs.
Another issue the survey revealed was that many organisations need more support with developing service user involvement, so we have recently published two guides to address this – an introductory guide to service user involvement and coproduction and a selection of good practice case studies.
Prison reform
We realise this is a significant issue for our members so we’re in the process of meeting all of the executive governors of the ‘early adopter’ reform prisons to discuss how they could involve the voluntary sector. In addition to this, we have published a discussion paper called The rehabilitative prison: What does good look like? which has been sent to all prison governors. The Reducing Reoffending Third Sector Advisory Group (RR3), chaired by Clinks, has also been providing advice on prison reform and the voluntary sector which the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) are using to inform the prison reform programme.
Prison reform is a key issue at the moment and we will continue to work with you to promote the voluntary sector’s involvement in the emerging system.
We have also worked with you to look at best practice in engagement between the voluntary sector and prisons. As a result, we have published a guide for prisons on how to work with the voluntary sector which has been sent to all prison governors. This is an issue that we will continue to focus on: we have recently begun a pilot with 3 prisons in the South West to develop good practice between prisons and the voluntary sector.
Release on Temporary License (ROTL)
Our members told us that the restrictions on ROTL placements were affecting their ability to help service users, so we partnered with the Prison Reform Trust to publish Inside Out, a joint briefing to inform the government’s review of ROTL. A number of our members gave us their views; the briefing highlights the importance of ROTL and the negative impact the recent restrictions have had.
Michael Gove has recently spoken about the ‘long term advantages for society of ROTL’ and Clinks will continue to advocate on this issue on behalf of our members. We are in dialogue with the MoJ and NOMS to consult on changes to ROTL policy.
Transforming Rehabilitation
Thank you to the 151 organisations who responded to our latest survey to tell us about how Transforming Rehabilitation (TR) has affected them, which is summarised in Change & Challenge. We have used the feedback to make seven recommendations and will be working on behalf of our members to push for these to be adopted. Clinks has worked with NCVO and the Third Sector Research Centre on this report and we are pleased that it has been featured in the sector press.
We understand that this is an important issue for many of you. We are already working with the MoJ, NOMS, Community Rehabilitation Companies, the National Probation Service and HMI Probation to take forward our recommendations. We will continue to listen to the sector and act on what we hear.
Clinks’ past 6 months in numbers
So far this year Clinks has:
- Published 7 case studies, 6 reports and guides, 3 responses and 2 briefings.
- Sent out 22 editions of Light Lunch, in which we have:
- Promoted 61 of our members’ events
- Advertised 54 funding opportunities
- Listed 51 items of news from our members
- Publicised 23 of our members’ reports and resources
- Held 25 events in 12 different locations in England and Wales
- Advertised 243 of our members’ vacancies for free on our job board
- Published 30 new blogs
- Supported 43 organisations through our consultancy support programme
- Tweeted to our 7681 followers
- Had over 70,000 visits to our website
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