Welcome Connections, 11th October, 7:30pm to 9:00pm, online

An evening to encourage and resource faith communities who are committed to welcoming prison leavers.

Is your faith community supporting people who have left prison? (Or do you want to?)

Join The Welcome Directory's multi-faith Welcome Connections event: sharing stories, hearing from someone who has left prison and learning about how the work of connected organisations can support you.

This session will feature Rev'd Bob Wilson sharing about Prisons Week, and the organisation Shewise, who supports vulnerable and marginalised women, including those affected by the criminal justice system.

In this session you will:

Hear the first-hand story of a prison leaver who has been helped by a faith community.

Gain an awareness of how various organisations support people who are in and have left prison, and how you can partner with them in your own work with prion-leavers.

Have opportunity to share stories, insights and ask questions about working with prison levers.

Register your place HERE.

The Welcome Directory is a multi-faith charity that has a simple yet powerful vision: to help faith communities become places where people who leave prison find acceptance. A place to belong that not only nurtures faith but also offers appropriate practical support.

Prisons Week 2023, Look Up! (8th - 14th October)

Look up!

This year we invite you to remember that the heavens declare the glory of God, and to look up.

Please share the film with your family, friends and church, and, with the leaflet available to download below, join us each day as we pray for all those affected by crime and imprisonment.

Visit HERE for more information and to download the prayer leaflets. 

Big Give Christmas Challenge, The Welcome Directory

The Welcome Directory is taking part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge and is looking for supporters of this incredible work to pledge a minimum of £100 for which Match Funding will be sought. Emily Green, Welcome Directory Project Manager recently released the following information about pledges. Please do consider how you might be able to support this charity, started by the Free Churches Group in 2014.

We are excited to announce that The Welcome Directory has applied to take part in the Big Give Christmas Challenge - the UK’s biggest match-funded campaign!

We are raising funds for our project ‘Christmas Connections’ to combat the loneliness and social isolation that people so often experience when stepping beyond the prison gates.

To take part in this challenge, we are looking for key individuals to support us by making 'Pledges’, which will be used as match funds to double online donations made to our charity during the Christmas campaign period. We cannot take part in this challenge without you.

We are aiming to raise a total of £1,500 in pledges to take part in the campaign. Could you pledge a minimum of £100 to help us reach this target? Your commitment to funding will also help us to secure additional match funds via a Champion (sourced by the Big Give).

You can make a pledge by simply completing the online form by the 30th of August.

What is The Welcome Directory?

The Welcome Directory is a non-profit, multi-faith organisation, dedicated to supporting the resettlement and social inclusion of prison leavers by building a network of welcoming and supporting faith communities beyond the gates.

Our work helps to combat loneliness and social isolation amongst prisoners in the post-release landscape, supporting positive mental health through faith-based social inclusion for reducing rates of re-offending.

The release period for prison leavers is an extremely challenging time, with an estimated 44% of adults reconvicted less than one year after leaving prison, which can prove devastating to an individual’s mental health. Connecting a prison leaver to a faith community can make all the difference – especially at Christmas. Our YouTube video 'Beyond the Prison Gates' captures, through the voice of prison leavers, the long-term impact that TWD can make to an individual’s release journey.

Whilst a small charity, we are highly regarded within the criminal justice sector, working in collaboration with HM Prison and Probation Service.

 The Welcome Directory has been acknowledged in both the House of Lords and the Church of England’s General Synod and has increased engagement by 187% since the end of 2020.

What is the Big Give: Christmas Challenge?

For seven days, the challenge offers supporters the opportunity to double their donations. This makes an extraordinary difference to the lives of prison leavers. One donation, twice the impact!

When our online supporters donate during the campaign period at Christmas, their donation is matched by your generous pledge. So, £50 from a member of the public is immediately doubled and becomes £100 directly to support the resettlement of prison leavers. Watch their video here.

• The fulfilment of your pledge is conditional on us receiving the appropriate online donations during the campaign. You will only be required to pay a pro-rata amount of your pledge if we don’t hit our online target - it's our guarantee to you that we are committed to raising additional donations.

• Please note that if you pledge to The Welcome Directory, you will not be able to make an online donation to us during the campaign period in December because your pledge will be used to match these donations.

We are incredibly grateful for your consideration. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with any questions about our Christmas Connections campaign.

Hello I'm Andy Kerr

Hello, I’m Andy Kerr, Managing Chaplain at HMP Ford Open Prison in Sussex.

Open Prison, I hear you say, what is that? Well, it’s a prison where instead of taking away someone’s liberty we start to give liberty back to them. It’s a very different prison from Cat A, B or C prisons, which appear mostly on our TV screens through dramas or documentaries. For example, a third of the people detained at Ford are working in ordinary jobs in the community, engaging with you or me every day: forklift truck drivers, office workers, gas fitters, crane operators and retail workers. We also release people home for 2 days a month and 4 nights once a month to rebuild family relationships, start parenting again and resettle. Onsite education and a college provide maths and English, with business studies, painting and decorating, engineering, drywall lining, and bricklaying courses amongst other opportunities.

How did I get to work in Prison?

I started out in life as a baker/confectioner, went into retail, delivered cars all over the UK, worked with children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, spent years working on a housing estate in the Midlands that BBC had unhelpfully entitled ‘Estate from Hell’ in their documentary, was called into Baptist Ministry and led a couple of churches. It was whilst leading a church in the South that I found many of the people I met on the streets swigging lager or smoking cannabis seemed to have offences in their backstory. Some had spent a long time in prison and some were in and out more regularly.

I was struck early on in my ministry by Jesus’ manifesto in Luke 4.

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

    because he has anointed me

    to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

    and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

If we the church are Christ’s body, then the ‘me’ in his manifesto becomes ‘us’! It really is that simple. So I left my church and started working at HMP Ford before going full time at HMP Lewes, and then finally coming back to HMP Ford in 2021.

Can I encourage you as churches to embrace His manifesto as well? I have found no greater delight, than to see the Holy Spirit of God working in prisoners’ lives, and the opportunity to join in with Him is a profound joy and a humbling experience.

Lastly a thought: the other day I met a young man in London who had been at HMP Ford. He said to me ‘how are you my brother?’!

Hello I'm

Hello

I’m Andrew Georgiou, a chaplain at His Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution in Wetherby, West Yorkshire and appointed back in March 2007. I took up my role after much prayer and consternation about a change in direction after many years in local Church ministry. What I had failed to realise when I applied and got the job, was that my role would be working with 15–18-year-old males!

It wasn’t too long before the Lord brought back to my memory a tearful prayer that I had made back in 1992 when I asked the Lord to help me reach young people, this was an area of ministry that I had always struggled in. That evening as I walked through the chapel, the tears came again but this time with thankfulness that God had answered my prayer, albeit in a way I had not expected.

Ministry in a YOI brings many challenges, in the last year or two, these challenges have increased by the addition of young ladies to our establishment. Self-harm was always an issue but, in some ways, has risen to a new level with the complexity that most of our young people have experienced in their lives. Whilst we have struggled to recover numbers in attendance at our Sunday worship post-covid, we are slowly rebuilding, and I regularly enjoy the support of some wonderful church volunteers who love to come and support me in the services I conduct and in the mid-week groups I run. The groups include Youth Alpha, Four Points Course and more. One of the courses I am a facilitator of is Time Out for Dads. This is a parenting course for young dads and is a Care for the Family Course. It is hard to understand at times how some of our young men can learn how to parent when they have not really had any positive parenting themselves, but it is a joy at the end of the course, when possible, to see them holding their babies in the end of course celebration.

I think that one of the most satisfying achievements I have made over the years, is the establishment of a charity of which I am the co-founder and a trustee. This amazing charity is called In2Out, a registered charity that aims to reduce reoffending among young people aged 15-21 through our mentoring and resettlement process. Our foundations are firmly based on the Christian Faith, and this is the motivation of most of our staff. You can look at our website for more information about this, https://www.in2out.org.uk/about-us .

I never imagined that God would answer my prayers by putting me inside a custodial setting, over the years many young people have made a response to the Gospel in our services and groups. As a chaplain, to my fellow chaplains, we can never be sure about the progress of the seed sown in our ministries in prisons, but we must never give up believing that one day the seed sown will produce good fruit in the lives of those we have the privilege and joy to minister too.

I love the opportunities which being a chaplain bring to me, I am able to serve as a small part of the Prisons Week Working Group, a facilitator on the Welcome Directory courses for those considering becoming Welcome Directory members and also as the Assemblies of God Lead for Prisons.

In the juvenile estate, no day is ever the same, you feel that you are working with an age group that are still open to change. Their broken lives can make you cry but their openness to soak up a message of hope for their future is a massive encouragement to press on.