Users of St Giles' Trust prisoner peer adviser project
Andy Ludlow Award winners the St Giles Trust received £10,000 for their prisoner peer-adviser project
Housing Minister Keith Hill MP and broadcaster Jon Snow presented the Andy Ludlow Awards 2004 to a packed audience in the House of Commons on 15th July. Both the Minister and Jon Snow commended the very high standard of all the 35 entries, emphasising the difficulty of selecting the overall winner and three runners-up.
The overall award - and with it a cheque for £10,000 - went to the prisoner peer-adviser project of St Giles Trust. £5,000 was received by each of the three runners-up: Streets Alive Theatre Company for their youth participation programme; St Mungo's for the Endell Street hostel prescribing service and Thames Reach for their 'moving-in, moving-on' project.
St Giles has established a peer-adviser project in HMP Wandsworth and Bullingdon, Oxfordshire. They train inmates to provide advice and support to others who have housing and homelessness problems. As well as preventing homelessness, this also provides the opportunity for peer advisers to obtain an NVQ level 3 qualification. In the 12 months to December 2003 peer advisers worked with 1,250 prisoners in Wandsworth, each adviser helping 20 people a month. Seventy-two tenancies were saved; 510 people were given housing advice and 350 referred to support services. St Giles is looking to extend this project to other prisons and the London Housing Foundation has provided a grant for the employment of their Prison Service Development Manager to achieve this. The prize money will be used to support advisers on release, helping them secure volunteering roles and job placements and funding travel expenses.
Streets Alive Theatre Company engages homeless people aged 16-25 and provides them with intensive acting training. They develop performances based on their own experiences of homelessness and take them into schools, hostels, drop-in centres and youth offender institutions. Through 'forum theatre' they engage the young people in the audience in facing up to the realities of homelessness. The prize money will fund a youth board to increase the voice of young people within the company, as well as covering practical expenses, such as paying for members to attend youth-related workshops.
St Mungo's and South Camden Drug Services have got together to provide on-site methadone prescriptions to 93 people who live in the Endell Street Hostel in the West End, more than four-fifths of whom have a drug dependency. Daily heroin injection rates were halved during a six-month pilot, which started in February 2003. The prize money will go on activity breaks that can help the move to lower drug use.
Four years ago Thames Reach launched the Moving-in; Moving-on project (MiMo). Ex-homeless people are trained in decorating and they then help other ex-homeless people to decorate and do up their own homes. In this way the newly housed obtain a smart place to live and the MiMo volunteers receive training and experience 'on the job'. More than 50 flats have been decorated so far and, in the past 18 months, 35% of trainees have found further training, jobs or started their own businesses. Not all end up in DIY - one has gone on to help build a school in Africa. The prize money will go towards the purchase of a van to transport staff and decorating materials.
Other shortlisted candidates included:
The Andy Ludlow Award recognises innovation and good practice in tackling homelessness and is open to public and voluntary sector organisations. The scheme is operated by the Association of London Government and is sponsored by the London Housing Foundation, the Homelessness and Housing Support Division of the ODPM and Housing Today. The award scheme is in memory of Andy Ludlow, a respected director of housing and social services in Haringey, who died in 1997.
The programme for awards in 2005 will be announced later in 2004.
