Christmas Newsletter 2021
This is the first Oak London newsletter and it feels like I should be sending this in a Christmas card with updates on my family. Apologies to any of you who would prefer that, but despite the absence of a card I do wish you a very happy Christmas.
As I write this, I am sitting in Pret in Liverpool Street waiting to go into Bishopsgate Police Station. Fortunately it’s to try and develop a referral pathway from their custody service, as opposed to a result of my own impropriety. It’s so loud in here it almost feels silent, which is maybe reflective of the story of the last few months of Oak London. There has been a lot of noise about the programme and a lot of work put in, but we continue to wait to complete our first pilot programme.
Some headlines:
Jan 2021: We were selected to be Gartner Consulting’s charity of the year.
The consulting agency provided us with 2 days worth pro bono work to develop the monitoring of our outcomes and match funded £7200. Thank you so much to all who have contributed financially over the last year. I have been blown away by people’s generosity and it has been hugely encouraging to realise there’s a community backing this work.
July 2021: We secured 2 grant funds which enables the pilot year to go ahead fully funded.
Sept 2021: We started to develop strong partnerships with police, local council services, and many charities who work in a similar sector.
We are currently working to develop more formalised referral routes with each of these organisations.
Oct 2021: We finalised our 5-part programme.
A special thanks to Chrissy and Akram as well as many others for all the work put into achieving this.
Nov 2021: First pilot postponed
We decided to postpone the pilot until January due to lack of successful referrals. Some feedback we received was that we had been ambitious in receiving referrals from organisations in a time when their main focus was in re-starting post-covid. I learned a lot in this time, maybe one significant lesson was to hold things lightly whilst still pushing to achieve what we set out to do.
2022
This is the year! We hope to run 3 programmes across the next calendar year and I am hugely excited to see how Oak London evolves. I will send out the next newsletter at Easter to keep you updated!
Thoughts and Prayers:
If you are a pray-er, please keep these things in mind
Thanks for the amazing progress made over the last year: people’s generosity with time and money, the funding, and for great connections made.
Continue to develop positive links with City of London Police including the possibility of receiving referrals of young men on conditional sentences.
That we would be able to take the first cohort of 8 young men on the first residential in January or March, and that these would be young men who would greatly benefit from the programme.
That we would continue to make contact with key people in partner organisations who catch onto the vision of Oak London, and how we are thankful for those we have already encountered.
For energy for the staff in planning and running the first programmes on top of their regular jobs.
