OUR VISION

For every young adult who has been in a women’s prison to know their worth and be living a fulfilling life in the community, free from crime and thriving.

OUR MISSION

To provide as many young adults in women’s prisons and the community as possible with the safe space, care and interventions they need to feel valued, supported and equipped to move forward positively with their lives. 

OUR VALUES

ID Essence are a faith based project. Our Christian faith inspires us in the work we do, it shapes our values as a project and guides the way we interact with our beneficiaries - who are from all faiths or none. 

These are the values that make up the foundation of our work:

INDIVIDUAL

Everyone is different and everyone is unique. We aim to celebrate the uniqueness of each individual we work with. We don’t try to get our beneficiaries to fit into a mould but make sure our interventions are flexible and can be adapted to suit each individual, so each person can flourish in their own way.

JOURNEY

We recognise that every individual we work with is on a journey and we are just one part of that journey. Journeys of long-lasting change take time, everyone moves at a different pace and rarely in a ‘straight line’ of progression. With this in mind we work with people for the long-term – always giving people the chance to start over if they need that and not giving up on them.

COMPASSION

We believe that God loves every person equally no matter who they are or what they’ve done. This is something we seek to emulate in the work we do – treating everyone equally with love, kindness and compassion. Because of the disproportionate levels of rejection and suffering women+ in prison have experienced, compassion is an especially vital component to our work; to recognise past suffering and provide a supportive environment to move forward positively from it.  

RESTORATION

There are no winners in crime. It can leave communities and all those affected feeling broken and fractured. We believe restoration is at the heart of the Christian faith and who God is. Our hope is that our work will reflect this by beginning to bring restoration where there has been harm. We want to help young adults in women’s prisons to feel restored in the way they view themselves and others.   

True restoration requires work on all sides and so it is our hope to see our society begin to grow in it’s understanding of people in prison, and the wider social injustices that have led them to be there. We believe that understanding is key to enabling communities to move through the fear, anger, hurt and stigma that surrounds crime and those convicted of crime.

We believe that as a society we need to be doing more to work for change in both attitudes towards people in prison, as well as the structural social injustices that are key causes of crime in the first place. We are committed to playing our part in encouraging this process of restorative change in any way we can.

FAITH 

We have seen that, for many young adults in women’s prisons, the Christian faith is not something they are interested in or have ever thought much about. We aim to provide space for young adults to explore questions of faith if that is something they are interested in, as we know that the Christian faith has the power to be transformative for a person. However, it is also important to us as a project that we are faith-based but not faith-biased, and we work with people from all faiths and none.