Inside Out is Together Women’s social enterprise attached to HMP Askham Grange.

HMP Askham Grange is an open prison estate that sees women who have previously committed offences working to reintegrate in to the community as part of their rehabilitation and resettlement. Inside Out replicates a live office environment where women from the prison complete work outsourced from local businesses.

The women increase their confidence, develop administrative skills, gain valuable experience with social media and IT packages and learn to liaise with the business community. Furthermore, by creating partnerships with the business community we improve the woman’s chance of employability when their custodial sentence comes to an end. This in turn reduces their risk of reoffending and provides them with the ability to create an independent future. The model attracts some funds back into the project to help sustain its future delivery.

We host community business mentors who support the women with self-employment goals, interviewing techniques and disclosure, alongside advice and guidance around CV writing and application skills. As Askham Grange and New Hall prisons are clustered, we are also able to share resources across both sites. This enables us to provide ad-hoc support for victims of sexual and domestic abuse in Askham Grange as the need arises.

“I enjoy working at Inside Out and it does give you the feeling of ‘normality’ coming down to the office and working on administrative tasks, this has helped me maintain my confidence in an office based environment which I feel I may have lost if I had done other work within the prison.” – S

“I enjoy working at Inside Out. I feel that it creates a more ‘normal’ working environment and has helped me to continue to maintain computer skills and also helped restore my confidence looking to the future.” – C

“What’s unique at Inside Out is that as well as the skills you have they are interested in the skills you wish to gain and will tailor the workload around this to give everyone experience. Working outside the prison walls has had a positive effect on my mental health not least because I can now focus on the future optimistically as I can use the experience when I am applying for jobs upon my release” - J

As well as improving the lives of women in prison, Inside Out provides a 5 star service to local businesses. The women working at Inside Out take a high-level of pride in their work because it is different from usual prison employment and allows them to use their skills. This means that their commitment to the contracts they work on is second to none. This is reflected in feedback from clients, with 75% labelling the service provided as ‘excellent’ and the remaining 25% as ‘good’. 100% of our clients said they would recommend the service to someone else. Take a look below to see the services we offer, and please don't hesitate to get in touch if you think we can help you!

We offer a high quality, low cost service and you can be assured that all the monies raised from work undertaken at Inside Out are reinvested back into the project, helping us support more women into positive, crime free futures.