Latest News

Huggard is now offering catering

The Huggard Centre is expanding its services to include corporate catering services. ‘The Huggard Café' offers a quality catering and delivery service, with a five star food hygiene rating, and is currently aiming to expand into running a commercial coffee shop to support its work with homeless people. Huggard can currently cater for meetings and conferences of all sizes.

If you are interested in placing an order please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Find out more about Huggard at www.huggard.org.uk

Do you want to help shape the future of volunteering and mentoring?

SOVA is keen to communicate with any organisations that are currently providing volunteering and mentoring services with and by offenders across England and Wales or would be interested in developing into this area. They will be holding consultations with these organisations and will be sending out questionnaires in the near future.

Why volunteering and mentoring matters

Volunteering and mentoring are essential tools in helping people caught up in the criminal justice system to get their lives back on track. Within the criminal justice sector there are some excellent examples of volunteering and mentoring. We need to have a better understanding of what works well and where there are gaps so we can build on success and identify areas for growth.

What SOVA is doing

Through the National Offender Management Service’s (NOMS) Volunteering and Mentoring Programme the aim is to create an improved delivery infrastructure for volunteering and mentoring with and by offenders. NOMS is funding eight voluntary and community sector organisations to work together to take this work forward and SOVA is leading on:

How you can get involved

SOVA is keen to hear from any organisations who are currently providing volunteering and mentoring service with and by offenders across England and Wales or would be interested in developing into this area. 

Please get in touch with SOVA if your organisation is providing mentoring services or you feel you can contribute to any part of the programme’s outcomes.

To find out more about how you can help, please email SOVA at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call 0114 2703 702.

Project to help organisations in criminal justice show they are ‘impact ready’ for payment by results contracts

This information is to alert you to a new project Clinks is running, and opportunities for you and your organisation to get involved.

Between April 2013-14 Clinks will be working with New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) to support voluntary and community sector organisations working in criminal justice to improve their capacity to undertake and/or commission research and evaluation. 

You can read NPC’s press release about the project here.

Are you increasingly being asked to produce good quality evidence of the effectiveness of your services? NOMS' Commissioning Intentions and the Transforming Rehabilitation proposals both place emphasis on 'evidence based commissioning'. This can be tricky for small organisations that may not have the resources or expertise needed for research and evaluation. This project will support voluntary and community sector organisations working in criminal justice to identify, produce and use good quality evidence which will help you to evaluate what works - and what doesn’t work - with offenders.

The project will provide support and resources and work with the sector to help you identify, produce and use good quality evidence.

If your organisation works in criminal justice, please consider completing this survey.

'Improving your evidence' event - Cardiff 2nd July

This free event will give participants an opportunity to:

• discuss with criminal justice voluntary and community sector organisations and commissioners what makes good evidence
• share and learn about effective monitoring and evaluation techniques and ways of overcoming the challenges and barriers to this 
• provide an opportunity to feed into designing the support we provide to organisations as part of this project

You can find out more and book your place on the Clinks website.

For further information about this project, please visit Clinks or contact:

James Noble, NPC, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , 020 7620 4863

Jess Mullen, Clinks,  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , 020 7248 3538

This project is led by New Philanthropy Capital in partnership with Clinks and supported by the organisations that are part of Project Oracle.

'Youth On Boards' project for 18- to 25-year-olds

Women Making a Difference wants to recruit 10 young volunteers aged 18-25 to take part in an exciting programme of training, mentoring and real Board experience...and it's all free!
    

If you want to chat more about it or to apply contact: