Funding Our Work

Good Vibrations, a registered charity (number 1126493), relies on charitable donations and grants to keep our work going. While we insist that every institution that hosts a Good Vibrations course makes a financial contribution towards our costs, for the time being at least the reality is that most are simply not able to pay anything like the full costs of one of our courses.

Prisons are having their budgets cut every year, while at the same time unprecedented over-crowding in the prison system creates huge pressures on their resources and organisational capacity. In addition, prison education funding (the most obvious category of prison activity that Good Vibrations's work falls under) is almost entirely tied up in Learning & Skills Council (LSC) contracts with large-scale 'prison education providers', meaning that the prisons themselves have virtually no discretionary funding for educational activities.

Despite repeated pronouncements from NOMS over the last few years about the importance of arts in prisons, there is still almost no statutory funding (whether grants or contracts) available to small, 'niche' projects like ours. 2008's NOMS Third Sector Action Plan pledged to remove the barriers to engagement and outlined specific actions to do so, explicitly mentioning the importance of arts in prisons.

This Plan, assuming it is implemented, represents a big step forward for the long-term viability of organisations like ours. However for the time being at least, in the absence of statutory provision for arts in prisons, Good Vibrations continues to depend on donations and grants from charitable trusts.