Charity marks five years

The Margaret Carey Foundation (MCF) is five years old on 14 July and is looking back on its achievements since it began with a positive outlook for the future.

MCF was registered at Companies House on 3 September 2009 and registered as a charity on 14 July 2010. Once registered, the number of projects the charity was able to support grew steadily with the last addition to the prison based bike projects being in Buckley Hall.

The majority of prison projects that MCF delivers are bike maintenance projects with the exception being the electrical mobility aids workshop at HMP Kirklevington Grange which is an add on to the PAT testing course they run there.

The prison workshops have been largely following the same model since the beginning of the charity however, the one significant change is the qualifications of our instructors. All our instructors are either qualified bike mechanics able to issue nationally recognised bike mechanic qualifications, or they are working towards this. MCF has promoted this and in one case helped fund the training.

The latest additions to the MCF projects are community based initiatives. Last year MCF managed to secure funding for a community bike project, run in partnership with a social housing provider, called ‘The Bikery”. The project was originally based in Wibsey but is in the process of moving to a more suitable location in the centre of Bradford. MCF has also been given the use of a vacant unit in Shipley Town Centre which is mainly used as a retail space. The charity has been organising monthly ‘pop-up’ bike sales in Shipley to raise vital funds to support the workshops at this venue in Shipley since May.

David Brown says: “I have never been a judgemental person and I passionately believe in giving people the chance to make amends for their crimes. I have invested many years of my working life in helping people in prison and the positive feedback we receive gives me an enormous amount of satisfaction. Prisoners should be seen as an asset, by engaging in the workshops they are working to make life better for disadvantaged people. At the same time participants of MCF workshops are developing a strong work ethic, gaining useful skills and are better prepared to play a positive role in society on release.”

Official recognition for his work came in November 2011 when David was awarded the Lord Longford Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recognised his contribution to restorative justice and work with prisons.

MCF is never very far from David’s mind and he has been an active fundraiser for the charity since the beginning. David has taken part in several Great Manchester Runs, organised garden parties and concerts with Chordiality and Steeton Male Voice Choir, which he is a member of.

David continues his enthusiasm for the prison workshops and has ambitious plans for the future of MCF. David continues: “I would like to see MCF continue to expand, I’m not sure if we will manage it in the next 5 years, but I would like to see MCF becoming a national organisation with a bike workshop in every prison.”

To continue funding the current workshops and to help realise the expansion plans David would urge members of the public to get in touch with their own fundraising ideas.

David says: “Helping people in prison isn’t necessarily seen as a popular cause to support but I wholeheartedly believe that we can break the cycle of reoffending if people are given right opportunities to learn new skills and develop a sense of what they can achieve.”

The Margaret Carey Foundation is a small registered charity, which delivers bike maintenance workshops in 10 prisons and the community across the North of England and Nottingham. The charity rescues scrapped bicycles and wheelchairs that are no longer in use and set up workshops where prisoners clean, adjust and repair them to a high standard. Once refurbished, a proportion of the bikes and wheelchairs are distributed to communities in need, in the UK and in developing countries with a proportion being sold to raise funds for the charity.

The charity is named after Margaret Carey MBE, the founder of the Inside Out Trust, who pioneered work in restorative justice and developing the basic business model that MCF now follows. The new charity MCF was named after Margaret Carey because we share her values. Margaret Carey has continued to support the charity and is becoming their patron.

MCF actually began in July 2009 through the hard work and dedication of Director, David Brown, who had worked for the Inside Out Trust as a Project Coordinator in the North East. Following the demise of the Inside Out Trust, David worked voluntarily using his own money plus some donations from friends to keep the wheelchair project in Garth Prison and the bike project in Liverpool Prison going.