A new era for the Trust

September 2006 saw the retirement of Dorothy Salmon, OBE, the Koestler Trust’s director for 25 years and the appointment of our new chair of trustees, Sir Joseph Pilling, former Director General of the Prison Service and Permanent Secretary of the Northern Ireland Office.  Our new director, Tim Robertson, is a poet and social worker who has spent 14 years managing services for children and young people in London boroughs.

We have carried out a thorough review of the Trust, consulted with offenders, partner agencies and funders, and produced a Business Plan for the next 3 years.  The Plan launches the Trust into a new era of modernisation, outreach and growth.   Our core activities of awarding, exhibiting and selling remain unique and profoundly worthwhile, so the Plan is co-ordinated around them.  But we have also identified some significant development needs, notably:

  • to increase the impact that our awards have on offenders’ lives,
  • to bring our exhibited artworks to much wider audiences.

Download a summary of our development strategy here.

Our first new initiative is a 3-year pilot arts mentoring programme for released prisoners, funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and an another anonymous trust. We hope this will enable talented prisoners to sustain their involvement in the arts, and help deliver wider benefits for them and for others, potentially breaking a cycle of re-offending.

We also have plans for other outreach and education programmes designed, for example, to:

  • engage more vulnerable offenders in the Koestler awards
  • attract offenders’ families and communities to participate in events around the exhibition
  • help more offenders continue to participate in the arts on release
  • give offender artists a stronger voice, both within the Koestler Trust and beyond.

We want to open up the awards, both to more offenders and to wider audiences, and to improve public understanding of the role of arts in criminal justice:

  • 2007 has seen our award scheme open for the first time to offenders in community settings, working with the Probation Service and Youth Offending Teams
  • We hope by 2010 to have a national programme of activities around a travelling exhibition, bringing it to a much wider audience of prison and other criminal justice staff, offenders families and local communities
  • Our national showcase exhibition, this year held in the ICA, a prestigious central London location, will increasingly focus on highlighting the best in offender art
  • It will also play a key role in our strategy to engage professional artists, senior decision makers in criminal justice and the media in recognising the potential of offender art, both creatively and in relation to breaking the cycle of reoffending.

And we urgently need to build up our supporter base – from both individuals and businesses  – to ensure our continued success and to help us increase our impact. If you are interested in our plans and believe you can help in any way, please contact trobertson@koestlertrust.org.uk

Flamenco Dancer
Mosaic Project in the exercise yard
HMYOI Rochester


Water Jar
Pat & Bill Gordon Merit Award
Rowan House


Stone Carving Project
HMYOI Reading