Changing
The World, One Life at a Time
The Shannon Trust is a
charity devoted to the development of literacy in our prisons through peer
to peer mentoring. The charity encourages and helps prisons to develop teams of inmates, who
run daily one-on-one lessons for illiterate fellow prisoners.
After several years of testing this simple idea, the
Trust is now driving an expansion of the successful system it has developed, across the
entire prison estate. We are currently in
contact with over 90% of the prisons in the UK and we have successful
schemes running in around half of them.
We have found that it takes just 4-6 months for an
average prisoner to learn to read on The Shannon Reading Plan from scratch.
The government's statistic is that
38% of all adult prisoners have
no useful literacy skills. A further
29% have very poor reading skills. That equates to over
50000 prisoners at any
one time.
And it is a moving parade.
The prison population is around 76,000 strong, but 90,000 inmates are
released every year.
So there is a constant stream of people
going through the system with very weak literacy. And all of them are currently almost barred from well paid and fulfilling employment.
At the moment we have around 1,000
prisoners receiving tuition at any one time.
Our aim is for every prison to be running
the Toe by Toe literacy scheme on every wing and for the probation service
to provide continuity in the months after release for those who have not
completed their training.
Learning to read should be just part of life for every
illiterate prison inmate. It can turn their time inside into an
opportunity to change their lives.
By this means, we can begin to tackle one of the most significant causes of
crime, at almost no additional cost to the taxpayer, since we use
inmate manpower for the mentoring.
Click on the links to the right for more in-depth detail.
If you are in a position to support
the Trust, in any way, we would of course be hugely
grateful.
The Trust has one full-time
employee, but is otherwise run by volunteers.
We have a network of around 80 local representatives who maintain contact
with each of the prisons around the country. Please contact us
if you would like to join the team. Your role will be to liaise between our central office and your local prison.
How £20 Can Change a Violent Criminal
causing Misery to those around them
Into Someone with Hope and Belief in the Future:
The
Trust currently receives no financial support from the government (by choice) and
so we are entirely funded
through voluntary donations.
Once our overheads are covered, the cost of each new graduate from our scheme is around £20. That is pretty amazing when you consider that it is sometimes the first thing that has gone right in their lives since they were around 6.
The impact on their self-esteem and sense of potential in the world cannot be overstated. It is a genuinely revolutionary moment in that person's life.
We cannot say that every graduate will lead a blameless life from that moment on, of course. But there is no question that it opens up possibilities that were closed before, and therefore creates the possibility, at least.
With Best Wishes,
Christopher, Bob and David
The Trustees |
