Hi, I’m Clementine and I’m at Safe Ground until Friday on a four day work placement. I’m 16 so I’ve recently finished GCSEs. I first found out about Safe Ground when I was googling charities that work with prisoners, thinking that I’d love to spend a week in the summer holidays helping them out. I asked my dad for some help and he told me about Safe Ground. Antonia Rubinstein, who set up the charity, is a friend of his that he met through the Weavers. We got in touch, and a few months later, here I am!
My journey here was pretty easy, and I had visited Safe Ground’s offices in April when I came to meet Eli (Eleanor Robertson, Deputy Director), so I found it without getting lost – a good start! I spent the morning with Charlie (Charlotte Weinberg), the Executive Director, which was really interesting. She told me all about how the criminal justice system works and about what exactly prisons aim to do (remove dangerous people from society, deter people from offending and reoffending and provide rehabilitation). She also told me about how the involvement between the government and charities works, and Safe Ground’s funding. It was an eye-opening morning, and taught me things that I really hoped I’d find out through this placement, so that was fantastic.
Lunch at the Portuguese restaurant round the corner was really good (although I was blamed for slowing down the order by asking for something too simple! You’re meant to pick at least six different ingredients for your sandwich apparently!) After that I worked with Chamonix (Safe Ground’s volunteer Marketing, Communications and Administration Assistant) on looking up fictional or historical figures that spent time in prison and updating our twitter feed. Check it out! @Safe_Ground. At 3:30 there was a meeting about the House of Lords event next Monday which involved lots of complicated figures which got me pretty lost! I had a great first day and was really excited to come again tomorrow.