Feltham Community Chaplaincy Trust

Who we are

Feltham Community Chaplaincy Trust (FCCT) has been in operation within HMP/YOI Feltham for the last 19 years. The prison is one of the biggest prisons housing children and young offenders in Europe. FCCT was originally set up by three Prison Chaplains in 2004, to help young people transition back into a community setting when they leave prison.

FCCT offer support under the seven pathways to reducing reoffending:

• Accommodation
• Education, Training and Employment (ETE)
• Health
• Drug and Alcohol Misuse
• Finance, Benefits and Debts
• Children & Families
• Attitudes, Thinking and Behaviour.

We work with young people (15–21-year-old cohort) from a faith and non-faith backgrounds. FCCT have placed a new emphasis on employment and training inputs. To do this we use trained volunteer mentors from all over London, where the bulk of our work is done.

Our aim is to help young people overcome hardships and make the positive transition back into wider society and to help to reduce reoffending rates.

The service that FCCT offers is important, as young people are the future and we need them to contribute positively to society and their communities. We also help to heal and improve the life chances for many whose futures would otherwise be cut unnecessarily short or blighted.

Benefit

• The longer-term benefit for society is to help to reduce reoffending, as well as
• Reducing taxpayer’s money spent on prisons, policing, criminal justice, and costs to victims of crime.
• There is also untold psychological damage which is reduced.

Recognising the importance of early interventions like ours also saves lives, as many caught up in a culture of crime at a young age can go on to commit serious crime or to be killed themselves.