The New Financial Year
As we begin the new financial year, Revolving Doors is starting an exciting project with our Lived Experience Team and NHS England. Over the next year we will co-design peer support in Liaison and Diversion services. This builds on our many years support to Liaison and Diversion advocating for the transformational power of peer support.
It is great to see innovative services for women with mental illness showcased within the Advisory Board on Female Offenders, chaired by Caroline Dinenage MP, Minister for Women, Equalities and Family Justice. This Board is ever more important as HMP Holloway closes and Transforming Rehabilitation completes its first year. Revolving Doors, with sector colleagues, also met recently with the Minister for Local Government, Marcus Jones MP, to stress how devolution could help stop the revolving door.
Launch of new Service User Involvement Guide
Revolving Doors Forum members Lisa, Richard and Joe were guest editors of new national guide to service user involvement and co-production in criminal justice, developed by Clinks and Revolving Doors Agency. The guide is aimed at all organisations who work with service users.
Our briefing for Police and Crime Commissioner Candidates
Revolving Doors, working with Clinks, produced a briefing ahead of the May 2016 Police and Crime Commissioner elections. The briefing highlights how the next generation of PCCs can work with the voluntary and community sector to reduce offending and improve community safety.
Our Policy Director, Vicki Cardwell, also spoke at a conference to police and crime commissioner candidates, outlining the potential for the role to help end the revolving door of crisis and crime. We will now work with newly elected PCCs over the next year.
Revolving Doors to give evidence to Work and Pensions Select Committee
At our April Forum, we were pleased to have a clerk from the Work and Pensions Select Committee join us. The Committee are conducting an important inquiry into employment support for ex-offenders. Following a lively discussion with Forum members who have recent experience of prison, we have been invited to give formal evidence to the Committee – both from staff and a lived experience perspectives. Our policy manager, Paul Anders, has written a blog.
Does where you live matter? We explore the evidence…
Revolving Doors and Lankelly Chase severe and multiple disadvantage network held our third seminar, this time exploring the theme of Place and its relationship to multiple disadvantage. Speakers included Dr Angela Donkin, Deputy Director at the Institute of Health Equity, who presented the data on the range of significant health inequalities experienced by people living in areas of multiple disadvantage. To find out more about the network or to read the seminar slides click here.
We speak at national conferences on peer support and involvement
Our head of involvement, Paula Harriott, spoke at the ADASS national conference on peer support in prisons, drawing on her own experience of supporting peers while she was in prison and now leading national strategies and programmes that involve peer support. Other speakers at this key conference included Chief Executive of NOMS, Michael Spurr.
Paula also spoke at the national Integrated Offender Management conference – up shortly after the Prisons Minister, Andrew Selous MP – on the importance of user involvement in criminal justice. We also showcased our Commissioning Together project which brings ex-offenders with multiple needs into the heart of local commissioning processes so they can shape the services that impact on their lives as peer researchers.
And finally…
We have recently welcomed some new members of staff to Revolving Doors. Paul Anders joined us in March as our new policy manager, having worked previously at Public Health England, Drugscope and Homeless Link. Rosie Andrassy is our new administrator who will be supporting our many lived experience projects. Mothusi Turner joins us from the Civil Service Fast Stream and will be with us for six months. One of his major projects will be developing a new website for the organisation. Many thanks for all your support for Revolving Doors. If you’d like to contact us about anything in this newsletter or would like to work with us, do get in touch at rosie.andrassy@revolving-doors.org.uk
