Children and youth

Storybook Dads

Allowing prisoners to stay in touch with their children

Storybook Dads provides an invaluable service which allows imprisoned parents to send their children a CD recording of them reading a bedtime story. This gives prisoners an opportunity to fulfil a natural parental role from behind bars and children the chance to maintain close contact with their parent, and allowing them to hear their voice as often as they choose.

Around 150,000 children are separated from their parents due to imprisonment each year. These children are often the forgotten victims of crime and can suffer from feelings of isolation, shame, abandonment and mental health problems.

Sharon Berry, project manager, says: We find that children often feel a lot of shame when their parents are imprisoned. This scheme however makes the children proud when they can take the CD to school and show it to their friends. It also makes them feel empowered because they can choose when to listen to it. Another example of how it can touch them is one very little child who is learning to speak is using the recording with his mother to help him learn.

Storybook Dads research shows that family ties between prisoners and their children helps to reduce re-offending and also reduces the disruption to the family which can lead to inter-generational offending. Berry adds: We felt that there was not enough being done to help prisoners maintain contact with their children and many prisons are located over 100 miles away from their families. We wanted to create a meaningful and intimate way to maintain contact.

The scheme also opens up educational opportunities for inmates such as literacy, IT skills, audio editing, improving confidence, and it also helps prisoners to value and perceive themselves as responsible parents.

Sharon Berry
Project manager
HMP Dartmoor
Princetown
Yelverton
Devon PL20 6RR
01822 892287
Reg no: 1101208
www.storybookdads.org.uk

Enthusiasm Trust

Helping young people break the cycle of deprivation

The Enthusiasm Trust, which started out as a local youth centre, has managed to regenerate a deprived and crime-ridden estate in Derby, and become a city-wide provider of youth services. The estate was recognised as being most deprived within the city and it was evident to the founders that there was a need for activities and initiatives to enable young people to achieve their true potential in life rather than be led into a cycle of poverty, deprivation and crime.

A key advantage to the charity is its partnerships with statutory agencies. It has been recognised not only by the local authority but also the Home Office. "We have built a business model that allows the community police to actually commission work from us to deliver and reach people they just can't get to. This business model not only means the charity can work with relevant parties, thus enriching the work it does, but it also means that the charity can be sustainable, allowing for a long future in serving its community," says Joseph Russo, chief executive.

The charity works with over 5,000 young people on a regular basis through its strategic work in schools, has an average attendance across youth clubs in excess of 100 young people in a youth club, and works with 164 young people at any one given time. These young people have been identified by relevant agencies as young people who are at high risk.

Russo continues: "We have seen over the five years that we have delivered the intensive work, an average of 90 per cent reduction in re-arrests which has been highlighted as one of the best rates in the country."

Joseph Russo
Chief executive
123 Hawthorn Street
Derby DE24 8BB
01332 362 479
Reg no: 1087438
www.enthusiasm.org.uk

Kidscape

Offering help to the severely bullied

Kidscape is the only charity in the UK offering free face-to-face courses to children who have been severely bullied and their parents. Since its ZAP courses began, the charity has managed to help thousands of children by empowering them to stop the bullying and helping them to rebuild their self-esteem.

The charity receives 15,000 calls each year from distressed parents whose children have been bullied to the point of being suicidal, self harming, truanting and being profoundly depressed. It felt it needed to develop something practical for the victims, beyond encouraging them to speak out about their abuse was needed. The ZAP programme has now become the keystone of the organisation and Kidscape has made it part of its mission to train others in how to operate the courses so the help can spread as far as possible, throughout schools and groups across the country.

Catherine Calvert, children's projects manager, says: "More than 5,000 children have directly experienced ZAP, and uncountable other thousands throughout the country have been trained by teachers who come to us to learn our methods. We would like to put ourselves out of business, with bullying a vanished part of schooling."

In a typical week, around fifteen children arrive, heads hanging, some hiding behind parents and some refusing to enter the room. However, Calvert says, "eventually they begin to participate, volunteering their thoughts and helping each other. By the time they rejoin their parents, they are different children, walking as if a huge burden has been lifted. One of the quieter attendees approached the charity's director one day and said 'this was the best day of my life'. In the world of intangible outcomes, that's the kind of measurement we are after."

Catherine Calvert
Children's project manager
2 Grosvenor Gardens
London SW1W 0DH
020 7730 3300
Reg no: 326864 
www.kidscape.org.uk

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