Forward Trust
Forward Trust’s mission is to empower people to break the cycle of crime and addiction and to achieve transformational change in their lives.
It provides help for drug or alcohol issues, homelessness, unemployment and mental health.
Forward Trust works mainly with people in the criminal justice system, including in prisons but also outside.
Size:
- Expenditure in most recent annual accounts (to 31 March 2022): £30m
- It provides “life changing services to over 16,500 people every year”
- Has around 430 employees, 20 trainees, and 150 volunteers
- It runs over 40 separate projects. It is proud that around 40% of its workforce has lived experience of the issues that it addresses
Age: Forward Trust was founded in 1991. (It has since changed its name)
Charity number: 1001701
Why the Good Giving List recommends Forward Trust
The Good Giving List recommends Forward Trust on the basis of an evaluation by the Ministry of Justice Data Lab. That looked at Forward Trust’s intensive programme on substance misuse in HMP Send (a women’s prison in Surrey) and was published in October 2019. It concluded that that programme by Forward Trust reduces the 12-month re-offending rate as well as the frequency of re-offending.
That intensive programme about addiction is where Forward Trust began and its roots, though it now provides other services too.
More about Forward Trust’s work
Forward Trust operates a range of services across England and Wales, with roughly 90% of the clients it serves in the Criminal Justice System.
Its services include support for:
- Substance misuse. This is the type of programme which was evaluated, and it dominates Forward Trust’s work: 79% of its expenditure on charitable activities
- Mental health
- Housing and re-settlement
- Support for men on probation
- Recovery: for people who are undertaking or have completed a substance misuse programme
- Family support: for people receiving treatment for drug and alcohol issues to rebuild relationships, and also for people who are struggling with the impact of a friend or family member’s substance misuse, even if the drug or alcohol user isn’t ready to get help
The Justice Data Lab evaluation which was conclusive was of Forward Trust’s Women’s Substance Dependence Treatment Programme in HMP Send. That is an intensive, full time 16-21 week abstinence-based Twelve Step programme aiming to reduce re-offending through psychosocial treatment and abstinence.
Intensive in-prison programmes is where Forward Trust began: it started with an intensive drug rehabilitation programme in HMP Downview in Surrey, and has grown considerably from there.
Forward Trust’s intensive programme is for people who are addicted: they apply to do the programme, and Forward Trust believes that the programme works best when it has its own wing of the prison.
The Justice Data Lab evaluation found that women prisoners were less likely to re-offend even if they didn’t complete the programme.
Some of Forward Trust’s services are funded by the state, e.g., it holds a contract from NHS England to run drug and alcohol services in Surrey prisons.
More about Forward Trust’s funding and how Forward Trust uses donations
- Most of Forward Trust’s income is public sector contracts: about £37m of total income of £40m. For instance, it has the contract from NHS England to provide drug and alcohol services in prisons in Surrey. Less than 10% currently comes from philanthropy: mainly long-standing relationships with some foundations
- For the intensive services. The state currently won’t pay for what Forward Trust thinks is really needed: the state will pay for the a basic service, but Forward Trust has found great benefit in delivering a more intensive programme (e.g., for extra staff, etc.: most prisons are affected by shortages of prison staff), which it believes affects offending and addiction
- The intensive service in a prison costs about £1m per year. Forward Trust receives about half of that from the state: the rest comes from private donors
- Forward Trust currently works in 19 prisons. With additional funding, it would be possible to run in about 15 of those prisons intensive services like the programme evaluated at HMP Send. In other words, with additional funding, Forward Trust could explore providing that intensive service in other prisons (which would also require prison authorisation etc.)
- Forward Trust’s total turnover is around £40m. The substance misuse service is a little over £20m of that. Its residential projects are around £5m. Its employment services are £7m, its wellbeing services around £10m. Forward Trust also runs around £1m of mental health services, and a fraction of a £1m on housing services
Other information: Evidence and strategy
- The Justice Data Lab has undertaken multiple evaluations of Forward Trust’s work. Five were inconclusive: this is simply the result of the sample size, and is not a reflection on Forward Trust or its effectiveness. The most recent evaluation (2019) concluded that the Forward Trust programme at HMP Send decreases the one year re-offending rate, and the number of re-offences within a year of release. It is inconclusive as to whether the programme has an impact on the length of time to re-offend.
- The programme at HMP Send uses the 12-step approach (as used by Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous. That is seen as one of the most effective ways of treating addiction, based on decades of research, mostly from the USA. Other research also demonstrates that high-intensity programmes may be beneficial for this client group. Forward Trust’s theory of change is built upon these two beliefs.
- Forward Trust uses the Justice Data Lab for evaluation. For charities working in prisons, it is normally impossible for them to set up experiments (e.g., randomised controlled trials) to assess their evidence, and also impossible for them to get data on any kind of comparison group of prisoners who did not get their intervention; this is the problem that the Justice Data Lab was set up to solve.
All photos credited to the charity