Safe Ground is a national arts organisation delivering high quality services and interventions to people in prison and community settings. Our work focuses on relationships, parenting and identity and uses group-work and drama techniques for participants to experience alternative perspectives, develop empathy and self-awareness alongside skills and competencies.
Safe Ground provides various programmes with the aim of achieving these goals both in prisons and in community settings, these are:
- Fathers Inside is a parenting programme in collaboration with HMPPS, for men in prison. Fathers Inside is taught on a full-time basis, focusing on early childhood development and the participants’ experience of being a child, as well as the importance of engagement in their child’s schooling and education. Participants are required to have or be the guardian of a child for this programme.
- Man Up is a group-work programme designed to support young and adult men to consider the pressures and expectations associated with being a ‘man’, many of which can exacerbate harmful behaviours.
- Our Own Stories is a unique, bespoke programme designed in consultation with Novus for women in prison. It is a personal development programme for women that encourages participants to reflect on and learn from their own life, experience new perspectives, rehearse alternative approaches and practice new relationships in a safe, secure and consistent space.
- Officers’ Mess is designed to specifically offer Prison Officers a space for both structured peer support and external supervision in coping with the stresses of the job. The programme is aimed at working with Officers to understand, reflect and question their own relationships to power, authority and control, their role and the impact of it upon their personal and professional lives. Where possible the training includes a mixture of officers with different levels of experience, from different areas and specialisms.
- The Thing Is… is a new issue based group-work programme designed to deliver a range of impact and outcomes. Each programme addresses a different issue to be contributed by both the establishment and participants. Themes should be priorities within the prisons e.g. family relationships, personal safety, mental health and self-care, relationships with staff, accessing services. The Thing Is… aims to increase capacity for dealing with difficult situations, encourage a renewed willingness and ability among men to support interventions and services that contribute to personal and cultural change, enhance progression and engagement routes and improved relationships between participants and the men.
T: +44 (0) 20 7091 9004
A: 2 Langley Lane, London, SW81GB
