Welcome to our website!

Welcome to our website and blog posts. My name is Michela and I am a co-director for our community interest company Co-Creating Transformation. I would like to introduce myself and the company as we are new and you would probably be thinking ‘co-creating what?’ 

So, here we go.

Co-Creating Transformation was created as a passion-project (sounds cheesy, but it’s true!). Both Lauren and myself come from backgrounds working with people in prison and other disadvantaged groups and we have both seen how positive support can be lacking for these groups. I have worked in several EU-funded projects and this has led me to see how further partnership and working together with different organisations makes such a difference. We wanted to create an organisation which functions on empirical and what-works driven evidence, where we could co-creatively collaborate with both institutional organisations and NGOs in order to plan and pilot studies for resettlement and rehabilitative efforts. We feel that interventions should be very bottom-up and this is why we strive to always work with, and for, the stakeholder.  And in a nutshell, that is how Co-Creative Transformation came to be.

The phoenix was chosen as our logo after weeks of debate on what would suit the company’s image best. Just as the phoenix gets a ‘second chance’ at life when it regenerates into a new beautiful bird, so too should individuals. We all make mistakes, it’s part of growing, however we should be allowed, and helped, to move on. The phoenix symbolises this – the mistakes burn in flames giving way to beautiful new opportunities, leading to transformation and change. It signifies inner strength and character too, elements essential for long lasting change. 

Perhaps now is a good time for a quick introduction to myself. I started my career in prisons after finishing off my MSc in Criminology and Criminal Psychology in 2011. My first job was as a prison officer in a high security women’s prison in the UK. Whilst II loved the job, the dynamics and the relationships I had within those closed walls, I constantly felt helpless and hopeless at being able to help these women on a long term basis. Everything seemed very temporary and at-the-moment and ultimately my job description entailed me to keep prison order. I struggled to live with that. So I decided to move on and try to find a career which allowed me a better chance to make a change. That was when I fell into prison education – I applied for a research job in a European university. This job was part of a European funded project with a consortium of partners from different countries – partners included think tanks, universities and most importantly prisons. I realised that a multidisciplinary approach where stakeholders are given the opportunity to have their say, produces the best results. For around 5 years I researched best practice, visited several EU prisons, made connections and met brilliant people on either side of the bars. I then moved to a teaching post in a UK university where I passed on these messages to criminology students. However, this role did not involve piloting interventions or working in the field. I wanted to do it all, so a CIC felt like the logical next step. 

This is what we want to show within these blogs too – how change can be achieved through collaboration. We will comment on experiences, events, and interventions with the focus on positive change. How can we assist others to move forward? What works? What does not? These are all themes we aim to tackle through the CIC itself and then comment on through these series of blogs. We would love to hear your thoughts on our comments and posts too – so please feel welcome to contact us on the comment section below or via email if you prefer. 

Have a lovely week,

Michela