ABOUT THE NEW BRIDGE FOUNDATION

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 159 volunteers to longer-term prisoners, especially those no longer in contact with family and friends. Every volunteer knows his or her prisoner 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 prisoner it is trying to assist, and 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.

The one feature they all our projects have in common is that central New Bridge belief; the only way to work effectively with those that are marginalised and have experienced a lifetime of exclusion is to stay with them for as long as it takes. There are no artificial cut off points in New Bridge's work. Some prisoners and ex-offenders will need a week to get their lives sorted. Some may take years. 

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.