Fine Cell Work
This charity helps prisoners return to society with skills to make them productive. Working with Pilotlight, they developed a new mission statement, a plan for sustainability, and nine clear and measurable objectives.Fine Cell Work trains and pays prisoners to make high quality needlework and soft furnishings in prison, enabling them to come out of prison with new skills and hope for a better future. The prisoners are taught needlework to a professional level and produce quilts, cushions and rugs. The sales of these provide them with an income, and the work offers prisoners a chance to gain a skill which gives them a sense of responsibility and pride.
Fine Cell Work approached Pilotlight in June 2004 looking for help with reviewing their growth targets (their existing plans showed a significant growth in the numbers of prisoners they planned to work with, but still left them in deficit after three years), building an infrastructure to support that growth, evaluation, marketing and the diversification of income streams.
The team of three Pilotlighters working with Fine Cell Work comprised the COO of the business to business division of one of the UK's largest food companies, the HR Director of the investment banking division of one the UK's big 5 banks and the Managing Director of the investment banking arm of Japan's biggest bank.
They guided Fine Cell Work's Director, Katy Emck, through the development of a Mission Statement, 9 clear, time-specific and measurable objectives and the strategies to meet them, and a business model which shows the organisation reaching sustainability in 2009. With the assistance of the Pilotlighters and the Pilotlight Project Manager, Katy drew this together into an Operating Plan which was well received by FCW's trustees, and approved in January of this year.
Through the process, Fine Cell Work's processes have been simplified to become more efficient, and the number of prisoners they hope to help has increased. Work has now begun on a series of specific projects including identifying the most profitable product mix, recruitment and human resources management, marketing, database and systems development and evaluation.
Shortly after he began to work with Fine Cell Work, one of the Pilotlighters visited Wandsworth Prison to see the FCW trainers in action. He wrote about the experience for the Pilotlight Newsletter:
"The visit left me feeling high and a week later I still feel a little high. Firstly, I was so impressed by the respect the volunteers commanded and I could really see how the charity was changing lives. I spoke to one man who had been in prison for fourteen years. He told me that nobody had ever treated him with respect until FCW came into his life, which was quite haunting. Altogether, there was an incredible atmosphere of hope, much of it a result of the prisoners pride in the excellent quality of their work.
Now I am interested in reading more about the profile of those who end up in prison and I realise in different circumstances it could have been me. I definitely think that everyone should get a second chance and I think FCW can offer them that."
Quote from Fine Cell Work's Director, Katy Emck:
"Working with Pilotlight is reinvigorating all my hopes for our charity, giving me personally a new lease of life as well as helping Fine Cell Work to fulfil its potential in ways which simply would not have been possible otherwise. It is a huge encouragement to an emergent organisation such as ourselves to have this quality of input. The Pilotlighters appear really involved and invested in our progress, and we are comforted and relieved that this is a fairly long-term process. Not only are we learning a wide range of new business skills, we have regained our sense of direction. It is an exciting time for us because you are helping to bring a long-held vision to life, which means that in a few years time we will be helping twice as many prisoners and, I hope, engaging them in a process with even more lasting benefits."