The Clink Charity
Providing training to people in prisons by running restaurants, prison kitchens, training gardens and an external events business. Clink helps its trainees to find jobs after release.
The Clink Charity aims to reduce reoffending. It runs three restaurants in prisons in England which are open to the public, and it also runs other catering operations.
Clink uses these operations to train serving prisoners, so that they gain skills and qualifications, to help them get full-time employment when they leave prison.
Size:
- Revenue in most recent annual accounts (calendar year 2021): £2.2m.
- Operates in 32 prisons. It trains 500-600 people per year, with around 400 training places at any one time.
- It runs three public restaurants, 31 prison kitchens, two kitchen gardens in prisons, an events catering business, and a bakery serving customers in South London.
- 71 staff
Age: The Clink Charity opened its first restaurant in May 2009
Proportion of charity’s expenditure covered by the evaluated programme: 100%
Charity number: 1134581
Clink offers vocational training and qualifications in its kitchens, the catering operations that it runs, and in horticulture to support the kitchens.
Clink also supports its trainees and graduates before and after their release, for as long as is required supporting them to find accommodation and work and whatever else they may need to avoid offending. During 2022, 70% of the Clink ‘graduates’ which it supported were employed after their release.
Why the Good Giving List recommends The Clink Charity
Several evaluations by the Ministry of Justice Data Lab have found that The Clink Charity’s work reduces the 12-month re-offending rate.
The Clink Charity runs several activities, e.g, public restaurants, prison kitchens, catering for events. It is unclear which activities were covered by the Justice Data Lab analyses. However, The Clink uses the same approach in all of them. Hence we assume that the evaluation findings hold true across all The Clink’s activities.
An analysis of the economic impact of The Clink by Pro Bono Economics used the reductions in re-offending identified by the Justice Data Lab, and from that, estimated that The Clink probably generates at least £4.80 in benefits for every £1 spent.
The Clink’s work
The Clink offers prisoners training for up to 40-hours a week while working towards City & Guilds National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). Simulating a professional working environment, prisoners with 6-18 months of their sentence remaining volunteer for the programme. The Clink offers courses for 14 NVQs.
The training opportunities are advertised within prisons, and prisoners opt-in. They go through a selection process.
Three months before release, each trainee is allocated a support worker who remains with them for at least a year after release, and as long as they need.
The Clink runs the following, each with the purpose of training prisoners in order to secure and retain employment after release, to reduce the likelihood of re-offending:
- Three public restaurants. They are in HMP Brixton (men’s prison in London), HMP Styal (women’s prison in Cheshire) and HMP High Down (men’s prison in Surrey). Prisoners work in the kitchens and in serving customers. (A fourth restaurant in Cardiff closed in 2022 year as the lease could not be extended.)
- 31 prison kitchens. This began in 2019.
- Two kitchen gardens in prisons: at HMP High Down and HMP Send (women’s prison in Surrey). The salad, fruit, vegetables, herbs and eggs produced from the gardens are frequently used in The Clink’s restaurants.
- An events catering business. All food is prepared at HMP Downview (women’s prison in Surrey) and the women are released temporarily to work at events outside the prison. This is a self-supporting business, serving events in the City of London. When possible, it uses produce grown at the two Clink Gardens. It is a nominated caterer for, among other places, St Paul’s Cathedral and the Guildhall London.
- A bakery. This is the newest project, opened in 2022. It is at HMP Brixton, and students are taught City & Guilds NVQs in General/Professional Patisserie.
At the time of writing, The Clink operates 39 projects across 36 prisons, including both male and female prisons.
How The Clink Charity uses donations
- Every training place requires subsidy.
- The Clink Charity receives some funding from HM Prisons and Probation Service for its training work, though not enough to cover all the training costs.
- The Clink Charity retains the revenues from its restaurants. Clearly those ceased completely when the restaurants closed during the Covid lockdowns – which were longer in prisons than elsewhere.
- Furthermore, The Clink’s plan includes:
- (a) expanding the number of training places, e.g., by opening more Clink Kitchens (for catering in prisons), and, if possible, opening a restaurant in a prison in the North of England
- (b) expanding the events catering business to include trainees outside prisons, such as people on probation, young offenders at risk of moving into the adult offender system, and those completing community payback.
- (c) improving its management systems. {This is part of a pattern that Giving Evidence sees all the time: many donations are for ‘the front-line work’, e.g., for training places, but in order to run effectively, the charity also needs systems, for tracking: applications; the effectiveness of its system for selecting applicants and improving that; attendance at courses; success rates in the various NVQs that it offers, and using those data to improve the training; employment rates post-release and using those data to improve the qualifications and support, and so on.}
More about the funding for Clink
- Government grants
- The Clink receives grants – some from companies and charitable foundations associated with food, e.g., the Worshipful Company of Cooks, and the Antonio Carluccio Fondation, and some from others, e.g., Goldman Sachs, a bank.
Other information
Evidence and strategy
- The independent evidence from the Justice Data Lab looks at: the 12-month re-offending rate; the frequency of re-offending; and the time to first re-offence. The evaluations find an effect on the first; on the latter two, they either found improvement or were inconclusive. (Inconclusive results are simply the result of the sample size, and not a reflection on The Clink Charity or its effectiveness.) The most recent Justice Data Lab evaluation of The Clink Charity published in July 2022: unlike the previous evaluations, it was inconclusive about the effect on 12 month re-offending: however, like the first and second evaluations, it found a reduction in re-offending frequency within 12 months. That most recent evaluation is unlike the others in that (a) it covers the start of Covid lockdowns, which obviously caused significant changes to the intervention and (b) it includes more women’s prisons than the previous evaluations did, and women’s re-offending patterns differ substantially from men’s.
- The Clink Charity 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