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Bullingdon Community Connections

Bullingdon Community Connections (BCC) foster partnerships between community groups in Thames Valley and HMP Bullingdon, delivering purposeful activities and individual support. The programme builds on the success of the two-year pilot in Oxfordshire that started in 2022. 

Bullingdon Community Connections is building positive links between the prison and local communities that will support the rehabilitation of individuals .

This includes: 

  1. Initiating new projects and partnerships between the community and the prison to open opportunities for purposeful activity and individual support. 
Bullingdon Community Connections

2. Enabling and supporting Prison Officers to link individuals to services that offer social and emotional support on release. 

3. Contributing to more effective working by assisting organisations – especially those under statutory contracts already in the prison –  to deliver their service through introductions, connections, system navigation, referrals, information-sharing and support for colleagues and partners.

And more broadly, by positively impacting the culture: 

  • Within the prison through increasing knowledge of, and connections with  community resources: ‘bringing the outside in’.  
  • In the local community by explaining how the prison works, and provide  opportunities to contribute effectively to rehabilitation, recidivism and desistence. 
Find out how your group/organisation can get involved in the project
“The benefit for staff has been huge, they now have someone to talk to about an individual prisoner’s needs and to get advice and support. It helps them do the resettlement part of the job when they are under so much pressure.”

Bullingdon Community Connections is guided by: 

  • The BCC Advisory Group including senior members of Bullingdon and OCVA teams alongside representation from Probation services and other Partners. They provide governance, oversight and quality assurance to the programme. 
  • Josh Wainwright – a uniformed Community Connections Officer working with the Head of Reducing Reoffending in HMP Bullingdon and Berny Auton – the Community Coordinator at OCVA. They both collaborate with the Voluntary, Community, Faith, and Social Enterprise (VCFSE) organisations across the Thames Valley to provide purposeful activities in HMP Bullingdon and opportunities within the community.  

“Overwhelmingly Successful” – the evaluation of Bullingdon Community Connections 

The overall finding from the independent formal evaluation which has been carried out across the first two years of the programme is that Bullingdon Community Connections has been ‘overwhelmingly successful.’  In particular, the programme has: 

  • Substantially increased the range of support services available to prisoners at HMP Bullingdon. 
  • Engaged many more community organisations (of all sizes) in the work of the prison. 
  • Improved the co-ordination of many key mechanisms and processes, particularly those focused on resettlement. 
  • Linked the prison more closely with the community within which it sits. 
  • Leveraged additional funding and resources for a wide range of projects and services. 
  • Generated a feeling of positivity among prison staff and community organisations that it is possible to initiate a range of positive activities within HMP Bullingdon.

External Evaluation Report

External Evaluation Executive Summary

If you would like more information, or would like to be involved in the project, please contact us using the form below:

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