SEPERATE WAYS
Our crime diversion program aptly named ‘Separate Ways’ tackles the issue of gang and firearm culture which now appears to have become woefully prevalent amongst large sections of the offender population and is now at an unprecedented high.
The idea of the program is that we strip bare the root causes of youth being drawn to these lifestyle choices and challenge those through a series of accredited techniques, seminars, media projects and mentoring schemes in the hope that these culminated efforts will bear the fruit necessary to change the trajectory of some of their lives.
Members of the group will be encouraged to share their experiences and through this analysis will slowly cultivate effective intervention strategies. This is achieved gradually through session based work and the authoring of PVD’s (Pre-Violence Datasheets).
These PVD’s are then drawn up by the facilitators to document each thought and emotion which drove the mentee in the run up to the first point of violence.
The idea is that once we have created a significant amount of PVD’s we can then identify those patterns of thought and emotion which have acted as trigger points and implement effective intervention methods to challenge those. These, once identified, are then tested cognitively through our Skills Practice sessions and fed back to determine their robustness through our regular check in process.
Our Chief Executive Bilal Dunn acts as the main facilitator for many of the group sessions. This allows our mentees who wish to fully engage a safe environment to explore their offending as his understanding of this challenging social landscape allows many of our mentees to navigate their way through many of the trust issues which had previously prevented them from taking the necessary steps needed to look critically at their offending pattern.