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About New Bridge |
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ABOUT US
New Bridge was founded in 1956 to create links between the
offender and the community. The intention is not to forget
the victims of crime but to prevent more people becoming
victims.
New Bridge offers a wide range of programmes to help
prisoners keep in touch with the outside world and prepare
themselves to rejoin it. Our original and keynote service
remains the friendship and support given by our 238
volunteers to longer-term prisoners, especially those no
longer in contact with family and friends. Every volunteer
knows his or her prisoner client as an individual with
their own personality, problems and potential and values
them as such. The relationship cannot otherwise work.
A similar approach hallmarks all our other projects and
makes them particularly effective. Unless a resettlement
or parenting programme is sufficiently sensitive and
flexible to recognise and respond to the individual, often
multiple, needs of the offender it is trying to assist, it
will not provide him or her with any lasting benefit. Of
course, this means the work is much more time consuming
but it makes it infinitely more useful to prisoners and
rewarding to staff and volunteers.
2006 saw the start of New Bridge's work in mentoring. It
is especially important for us to ensure that our good
work in prisons is not undone through any lack of support
once in the community. We are now able to link prisoners
in HMP/YOI Swinfen Hall with mentors in the community.
Thanks to support from Lloyds TSB Foundation, we are
piloting a mentoring service in Liverpool, which began
work in November.
Volunteers are not simply extra pairs of hands. They bring
prisoners personal warmth, a variety of special skills,
experience of life and proof that the community has not
given up on them.
OBJECTIVES
New Bridge achieve its objectives by befriending men,
women and young people in prison through a national
network of volunteers; by running projects in specific
prisons focusing on resettlement needs; and by encouraging
the public to accept the need to reintegrate ex-offenders
into the community.
To donate now, please follow this link:
www.bmycharity.com/new-bridge
The New Bridge Foundation
- A company limited by guarantee registered in England
Registered Company No: 5048063
Registered Charity No: 1103511
Registered office: 27a Medway Street, London, SW1P 2BD
www.newbridgefoundation.org.uk |
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