Make a referral
If you are working with a woman with experience of the criminal justice system, you can make a referral for her to receive expert employability support from Working Chance.
Referral criteria
We welcome referrals for anyone in England and Wales who has a conviction, and who identifies as a woman or non-binary.
We haven't uploaded our referral forms to the website directly, as we'd prefer you to get in touch first. That way, we can guide you through the process and make sure that everything is smooth and efficient.
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We are the right service for a woman who is ready to work. That means something different for everyone, but put simply, where other serious needs must be met first (like housing or substance misuse), we probably aren't the service for her.
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Every woman we support is at the point in her journey that she is ready to move on from her convictions and the events that led her there. She is looking forward, and knows that she'd respond differently in the future.
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At the minute, all of our support is delivered remotely, through Zoom or over the phone, so she'll need a device and a reliable internet connection. But if that's likely to be a problem, please get in touch anyway and we'll see what we can do.
For organisations
If you are an organisation working with a woman with experience of the criminal justice system who might benefit from our support please email referral@workingchance.org
For charities, prison and probation, and Job Centre colleagues
The evidence indicates that for most women who get caught up in the criminal justice system, it's connected to trauma, poverty, social exclusion and coercion, rather than rational decision-making. Most women with convictions have had to make very difficult life choices with poor options available to them. But that said, we ask that each woman we support has the ability to reflect on her convictions and know that she would act differently in the future. By taking this responsibility, she is best placed to disclose her conviction to an employer: ready to focus on her future and not her past.
I didn’t know what to expect, but today has shown me that I’m not on my own.
Nora Working Chance client