A PROJECT to help Scots women battling substance misuse and offending has received a major boost after being handed nearly £100,000 by Comic Relief.
Almost 100 women – 32 for each of the next three years – will be able to participate in the Next Steps programme run by Edinburgh-based Venture Trust thanks to the grant of £95,423.
The three-phase initiative works in partnership with a number of criminal justice teams and voluntary groups to select and prepare women for the course. The charity then takes them to its residential centre in Applecross in the Highlands, where they are faced with a series of rigorous outdoor and personal challenges.
In the final phase, the charity links up again with its external partners to help the women transfer what they have learned to their home lives, supporting them while they look for work or training opportunities or end violent relationships.
This type of initiative is likely to become more common as its approach reflects many of the key recommendations in Dame Elish Angiolini's Commission on Women Offenders, published in April, in particular the need to address the underlying problems such as addiction, domestic abuse and poor mental health that lead some women to turn to petty crime.
Sixty women aged between 16 and 57 have completed Next Steps, which was launched by Venture Trust in 2010 and given financial support by Comic Relief for a pilot. The charity said 83% of the women who completed the programme turned their lives around.
Mark Bibbey, Venture Trust chief executive, said: "We are extremely grateful to Comic Relief for this generous grant. Their support for our Next Steps programme is a fantastic endorsement of the timely and effective nature of our work with women involved in offending."
Joe Connelly, head of programmes at the Venture Trust, said the physical challenges from being outdoors in a wilderness setting were key to the project's success.
"People get the opportunity to take off their usual masks by being in a totally different environment," he told The Herald in an interview for Society earlier this year. "We're able to tap into the potential of who they can be rather than who they think they are – especially if they've been labelled as offenders or drug addicts or alcoholics.
"There's an immediacy about the wilderness and about the activities the women do."
The funding came from the Scottish Sport Relief Home and Away Fund. A spokesman for Comic Relief said: "The Scottish Government have jointly matched Sport Relief's contribution, with the Home and Away Programme funding forming an important part of its commitment to delivering a lasting legacy from the 2014 Commonwealth Games."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article