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First Good Vibrations annual report and accounts

We’ve just signed off our first annual report & accounts since we set up as an independent charity in April 2009. As well as providing the information required by the Charity Commission, we have taken the opportunity to describe the rationale for our work and the outcomes we deliver, provide an account of our achievements over the year, and outline our future plans.

2009/10 was a successful and eventful year for Good Vibrations:

– we ran 26 Good Vibrations courses hosted by 19 institutions (16 prisons, 1 special hospital, 1 probation area and 1 other community setting), benefiting 438 people in all.

– we ran a successful pilot within London Probation’s hostels for high-risk male offenders.

– we worked for the first time with young people in the community, running gamelan courses for two groups of ‘NEET’ (not in education, employment and training) young people undertaking a 13 week employability skills course.

– our on-going efforts to gather evidence of the effectiveness of our work were rewarded in December 2009 when our one week gamelan courses were awarded “approved intervention” status by NOMS’s (National Offender Management Service) Directorate of High Security Prisons. This means that Good Vibrations is now officially recognised as an effective tool for high security prisons in their efforts to reduce reoffending.

2009/2010 was a challenging year for many organisations delivering arts projects in prisons, including Good Vibrations, owing to the Prison Service Instruction (PSI) on “acceptable interventions” issued by the then-Secretary of State for Justice in response to negative tabloid coverage. This PSI had the effect of discouraging some prisons from hosting arts projects and also dramatically increased the amount of bureaucracy faced by both host prisons and arts organisations. Good Vibrations submitted evidence to Ministry of Justice on the impact of the PSI on our work and on other arts organisations. A revised PSI, issued in Summer 2010, is much more positive.

We have deliberately gone for a no-frills, un-glossy report, to save money, focusing instead on providing useful and interesting content. To download the report and accounts, please click here.