Laying down the foundations

The strategy sets out our purpose: fostering “lively spaces for collaboration and learning, where conventional criminal justice policy agendas are scrutinised and challenged, fresh knowledge and ideas are discussed, and transformational solutions are developed”.

Since its publication, our trustees and staff have been working on the practical implementation of our statement of purpose, and on the wider analysis and commitments the strategy sets out.

The strategy, for instance, outlines three priorities:

1. the delivery of connected and impactful programmes;
2. improving our capacity to work with our various networks of partners, collaborators, members and supporters; and
3. investing in our organisational foundations, including our building and our various mechanisms for communication and engagement.

Through our programmes, we have scored some notable successes. Over the past decade, work initially developed by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has led to the establishment of three new organisations: Drug Science, One Small Thing, and Community Plan for Holloway.

Impact can be as much about what you give flight to, as it is about what you hold onto.

Our decade-long UK Justice Policy Review programme, and our ongoing partnership working on the significant injustices of joint enterprise prosecutions and the imprisonment for public protection sentence, are just some examples of other high-impact programmes of recent years.

While we have catalysed and achieved a number of notable programme successes, these have not necessarily been complemented by a consistent, long-term investment in our organisational foundations, and in the networks that help sustain our work and give it meaning. The risk is of solid programme successes, built on slightly wobbly foundations.

The vagaries of funding models are part of the challenge here. It is often easier to secure grant-funding for focused pieces of work, with relatively straight-forward outcome measures, than for broader-based, public educational and networking activity, the results of which sometimes appear more intangible.

But it is also about ensuring clarity of purpose, and the focus and discipline necessary to deliver on it.

Over the next few years, we will therefore commit to laying down the foundations necessary to sustain our work over the long-term, including:

• investing in our building as a hub of activities for those based in it, and those who visit and use it.
• deepening and broadening our existing networks of partners and collaborators, members and supporters.
• establishing a consistent set of publication, event and online materials, offering broad-based knowledge and ideas on criminal justice, to complement the more in-depth, focused work on particular criminal justice issues that we will continue to undertake.

We will be announcing more on our developing plans in the new year.