A Newbie's Perspective: Our latest recruit to the team, Rachel Bull, has penned a short piece about her first month at TiPP

In November 2012 an unassuming, modest advert for a project manager job caught my eye – and changed my life!

I lived in Glasgow, working for a Scotland wide organisation using music as a tool for personal and social development. I set up and ran a wide range of projects with a variety of partners including community centres, hospitals, nursing homes and schools from Gretna Green to Lerwick in Shetland.

I had always believed involvement in the arts can be a transformative experience but as I saw the personal impacts projects had on individuals, I began to understand the unique power the arts has to enable people to really change their lives – for the better. So when I saw that unassuming, modest advert, I jumped at the chance to put the skills, experience and knowledge I had into working with some of the most vulnerable members of society.

The first and most obvious way it changed my life is that I now live 200 miles further south; I’d like to say it’s warmer and drier but that would simply be a lie! Secondly, my background is in music – orchestral music at that – and now I am working across many different artforms and genres.

However, the changes go much deeper than moving house and learning about drama. The last two months have not only made me question what I thought I knew, but what I thought I thought – about politics, people, society and crime. I tried to put this into words for this article; to express it through a fictional case, to talk about people’s progress through the criminal justice system and the impact it has on them; but I just ended up with lots of pieces of paper screwed up in the bin.

The nub of it comes down to one word – ‘individual’. People are individuals whether they are inside or outside of prison. They have individual circumstances, individual needs, individual issues, motivations, barriers, hopes and dreams. The pathway they took to committing an offence will be individual and hugely complex, often full of instability, issues, difficulties and barriers.

It is easy to see someone as a criminal, label them as a bad person, an offender, someone who should not be allowed the freedoms of society and prison is a convenient way for them to be out of sight and out of mind. But who knows how any of us would cope faced with that same set of unimaginable, often horrific circumstances. Is the solution simply to lock them away? Or should the focus of the Criminal Justice System be to support people in dealing with that complex set of circumstances, enabling them to take control of their lives and make positive choices?

TiPP is a small charity with comparatively few financial resources. But the human capital in terms of knowledge, understanding, empathy and passion for both the arts and individuals means its output and impact is huge. This is not about ‘treats for cheats’ but about giving people a different way of thinking and working, it’s about using the arts as a tool to allow people to take control of their lives and make positive choices.

There is no one size fits all solution and I certainly don’t profess to have any answers! They are coming over time but so are more and more questions. All I know at the moment is that I am looking at people differently, from family and friends to the homeless guy I walk past every morning on my way to the office. What brought them there? What path did they take? And are they really so different from each other?

Unreported Moments - Paul Gent's Doocumentary Images Over the past ten years, the very brilliant visual artist Paul Gent has been employed to document a range of TiPP projects. He has worked with us on prison projects accompanying our staff in HMP Hindley, HMP Lancaster Farms and HMP Lancaster Castle as well as on many of our community projects with adults and young people. We now have a portable exhibition of his art that we hope to tour to interested venues in 2013. Paul's unique style allows him to capture the mood of our work - and some of its challenges. His approach captures unscripted moments that would otherwise go unreported. Examples of Paul's work can be found here: Paul Gent Images For more information e-mail: admin@tipp.org.uk Posted on: 9/01/13

Trafford Summer Arts College Paul Gent

New Blagg! Set Rob Evans

NEW Re-Vamped Blagg! Set Available for Purchase Our ever popular Blagg! programme has undergone a few transformations over the years. Following feedback from Youth Offending Teams that use the programme we have radically re-designed the set and employed a specialist manufacturing organisation. The floorcloth is now made of printed vinyl and the Blagg! head is constructed of a lightweight wipeboard. All in all, it makes the set more portable and easier to transport. For more information about Blagg!, go to: Blagg! If you would like to know more, mail us at: blagg@tipp.org.uk Posted on: 9/01/13

Former Student Running NY Marathon

One of our star students from last year, Dash Barber, is running the NY Marathon in February and we are proud to announce that he has nominated us as his nominated charity. If you would like to sponsor Dash, all funds raise will come to TiPP. We will be posting a link to the fundraising page in the next few days, so please come back to find out more.