To mark the Charity Awards 2025 opening for entries, the founder of 2024’s winner, Chris Parsons, sat down with the Civil Society Podcast for a chat about all things Charity Awards. In this episode, the Landworks boss discusses Chris’ experiences helping to found the charity, and its experiences of the Charity Awards, including how it feels to win.
The Charity Awards 2025 are free to enter. For more information, click here.
You can listen to the interview now below or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Pocket Casts, where you can find our other podcast episodes, including interviews with last year’s winners.
AI-generated transcript
Emily Moss: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Civil Society Podcast. I'm Civil Society’s junior reporter, Emily Moss, and on today's show, I'll be speaking with Chris Parsons, the director of Landworks, the winners of this year’s Charity Awards. Landworks is an absolutely incredible charity, based down in Devon, who work to rehabilitate prisoners and ex-prisoners through working in the great outdoors.
In this episode, we will discuss Chris’ experiences helping to found Landworks, and its experiences of the Charity Awards, including how it feels to win. Applications are now open for the 2025 Charity Awards brought to you by Civil Society Media and overall awards partner, CCLA. Most importantly, the Awards are free to enter until the deadline of Wednesday the 26th of February 2025. Shortlisted charities are invited to attend the presentation ceremony in London in July next year as our guests. More information can be found at charityawards.co.uk.
I hope you find this conversation with Chris interesting and useful, and I'll speak to you again at the end.
EM: So I guess the first question I have, and is probably a question you've been asked a lot, is how did Landworks first come to be?
Chris Parsons: Well, we actually officially started in 2013. It took a while to get it going. And it's really based on my previous experience. I had started employing people through a company I'd started up about 34 years ago, I think maybe 33 years ago -- anyway, a long time ago -- and the first man I employed was actually in recovery, and it proved to be very good for him. We were working outside, doing lots of different bits and pieces, and, it was really helpful, very therapeutic for him in in his recovery.
I hadn't set out to do that at all. He just happened to be someone who I met. I didn't realize he was in recovery at the time. And then as the years went along, I started taking on other people, some of whom were just great builders and carpenters, but others, about a third of the workforce, always had remained, people who are having trouble with life – got on the wrong side of the law or the police.
Then in 2005 I started taking people directly from our local prison, and they would come and join us and work with us. And it was that mix of people that proved to be such a powerful, powerful resource, really. And then as that went along, I started to realize that actually there needed to be a halfway house between, or something between, the criminal justice system and the real world.
People would just fall out of prison or they’d just come through the criminal justice system, and [think] everything was then going to be alright, [which] was just ridiculous, without some sort of support before reentering their community. So that's really was the basis for Landworks.
I approached Dartington Hall Trust with this idea. I don't know quite what they thought, really -- someone just turned up with this idea. But they were, in fact, incredibly supportive. And Celia Atherton, who was a director of social justice at that time, was hugely supportive, and we were able to find a piece of land on the estate, and we rented it from them, and that's how we got started. Really. Oh, wow, yeah, that's amazing.
EM: Wow, that’s amazing. And so, your background, as I understand it, was as a landscaper…
CP: That's right, yeah, landscape construction, earthworks. In fact, I thought I'd become a farmer when I left school -- I wanted to be a farmer. I was born in Aberdeen, and worked my way south, and over those years, decided that I wasn't going to be a farmer, although I've always enjoyed growing and outdoor working.
EM: All right… so you didn't previously envisage at all getting involved in prison rehabilitation?
CP: No, not at all. And I didn't set out with any theory or any idea that this was a good thing to do or that it could help other people.
EM: I suppose at the time as well, it must have been quite revolutionary because it was quite a long time before they started having more progressive conversations about how to rehabilitate prisoners.
CP: I think so, and I really wasn't aware of it at all. I mean, I did become aware as I started working with people who had experienced prison or who had [done] community service. I soon started to learn and hear, often quite a one-sided version of events, and that took me a while to realise I was just hearing one side of a story, and often quite a sugar-coated version of someone's life, which is fair enough. And then I guess I was quite naive, really, 35 years ago, and [with] a lot changes, you learn a lot.
EM: Yeah, yeah. When you first set it [Landworks] up, did you only take prisoners from local prisons?
CP: Yes- in our in our landscaping construction work? Yes.
EM: And now what's the extent of that now-- do you take prisoners from any prisons?
CP: Yes, and actually, for a time, we took people on day release at Landworks. Since COVID, that's actually ground to a halt. I think there was still a desire within the prison -- the local prison -- to provide day release prisoners here, but it hasn't happened. So, we work with people at the moment from the point of release, and also people on community service. About 70% of people here have served time in a prison, mostly local prisons, but quite often people will be coming from further afield, returning home, or even resettling to this area.
EM: Okay, right, I see -- that's interesting. Did you face any challenges when you first set the organisation up? What was the sort of response you got? I mean, you say it was quite positive overall, but did you face any opposition?
CP: We did. We faced a bit of local opposition, which, no, I mean, people weren't protesting, but it was understandable, I think, in a way, they wanted to know, why were we helping criminals and not young John down the road who hadn't been able to get a job?
EM: Yeah, I see…
CP: And there's quite a nice story. We’d been here about three years, maybe longer, and one day, a chap stopped me at the gate, the field gate, and he said, ‘My wife and I walked past here every day, and I have to say that we didn't like the concept, didn't like the idea at all, and we're really quite against it,’ he said, ‘but I've watched you over the last three or four years, and everyone's worked so hard. I have great admiration for what you've done.’
And I thought, ‘wow, that's good!’ So that's a member of our community who's pretty anti and through watching us and observing us, it completely changed their mind.
Being the new kid on the block was difficult… trying to suggest to the prison service, and indeed, the probation service, that this was a good idea. That was hard going. Why would they consider us? We had no real track record. And we had no finance behind us. We'd rented an old quarry that was really a rubbish dump with grass. I remember I bought one governor out from the prison to look at the field before -- this is about 2012 -- and he stared at it and stared at me, and then just got back in his car and drove off. So, you know, I mean, understandably, they must have heard lots of people with lots of ideas…
EM: I guess now though that you've had so much success, would you say that the attitudes, especially from the prisons and the probation institutions, has changed?
CP: Yes, I think we've definitely proven ourselves, absolutely. We work very closely with our local probation service and indeed, the prison service as well. It’s taken time, and winning the Charity Award has been a tremendous validation of everything that we're doing.
EM: Yeah, yeah, I bet!
CP: It sort of coincided with being 10 years old as well, which was, again, a very helpful landmark to reach. [At] 10 years old, people started to pay a bit more attention and, I think, started to look at the way that we deliver our resettlement, which is different, but the outcomes speak for themselves. You know, we do improve wellbeing, and we do thus we reduce reoffending rates,
EM: Yeah, yeah, massively. What sort of projects on a typical daily basis, do your staff and your volunteers and things undertake?
CP: We do a whole range of things. So, every day the wood workshop is running. We have a pottery workshop that's very popular today because it's very cold down here, and unusually cold for us -- we've had snow this morning -- so we have a small pottery workshop, we have a market garden, and we have a lot of general site maintenance and building that goes on. So [we] encourage everyone to get involved in something and the work that we do has a purpose: we have to sell the products. So, yeah, [the pottery workshop] turns out pots and the woodworking shop makes chopping boards, tables, etc. So they [customers] have to make their way to our shop, and the money that comes in from that is incredibly important to us. About 20, 25% of our income is derived from those sales.
EM: Oh right, okay, because I was going to ask in terms of your finances and your funding, so you get a lot from, I guess, trading activities, then?
CP: We do, and I really like that. It's really important, even if, you know, these are perhaps fairly small items selling for a couple of quid and upwards. But it’s wholesome, and we are following a group of good customers, and then [that] becomes a real point of interaction between the guys who are working here and the public -- their community – again. It's helping people get back into the community, allowing the community to accept them, and allowing them to feel that they can be part of that community. And often it's a community that they hurt in the first place that, yeah, you know, re entry to sounds like an Apollo mission, that’s often part of it. It's very hard to get back over the line when you become criminal, it's quite hard to move away from that. In fact, it's very, very hard to move away from that. And you can do so the project like Landworks, where you can become a better version of yourself, but adopt a new identity. In fact, try out different identities while you're here. And if you've been criminally active for a large part of your life, that is a big shift.
EM: Yeah, massively -- I can imagine. It must be quite empowering for them.
CP: I think it's very helpful. So we have people at different stages here, so some people have just arrived, just started. Some people may have been here six to nine months, and that's incredibly helpful for others to see different progress, how people have responded to the sit down and at lunchtime and hear the different chat, and our graduates as well who come back here to visit. That's incredibly powerful. And probably one of the most important parts of the whole program is our connection with our graduates.
EM: Yeah, sounds really amazing. And how has it [Landworks] like evolved and changed as an organisation over the 10 years that it's been around? Has there been big shifts in terms of staff structure?
CP: Yeah, we've grown obviously, yeah, yeah. We became an independent charity in 2016 and formed a Board of Trustees. I think we've been very good at being flexible. So when things have got tough or areas of the criminal justice system change, we've been able to flex quite quickly and adapt. So, we've kept people coming out here, which is fundamentally what it's about. It's about the guys who can get out here on placement and help them to change their lives. As we've grown, we've often learned, as we develop things, and we've realized providing resettlements, we've learned that people feel that it's a safe place to be, actually having a hub, somewhere to be, is incredibly important. Yeah, people [who] have come here feel sense of ownership to it, because they've built it, they've created it, their ideas have helped develop it, and we've listened to that. So we've listened to the feedback that we get from everyone. So feeling it's a safe place, it's allowed them to undertake counselling here and other workshops around building relationships or working with drugs and alcohol teams and so on. And rather than them going to an office in Torquay, [they get to ] to actually take part in these workshops in somewhere that they believe in, it's not only one people taking part, but two, it becomes all the more powerful for it, because they have some ownership in it and some stake in it-- that's been very critical to the success here.
EM: Oh wow, yeah, yeah. So would you say that you faced, more recently, any significant challenges, especially in terms of, say, funding, or finance or anything like that?
CP: Yeah… I mean funding is always a priority. We're always aware of it. I think, having built up evidence over the last 10 years, we have quite a good story to tell. I think that that's very helpful. Yeah, I think moving away from the pandemic, we've seen people struggling more, I think, more, in the last 18 months than ever before. We've seen people who come here on placement, their lives have become harder. And I think that’s for a number of reasons, but we've watched key services around us just drop away providing less levels of support, and that's really having a knock on to the people we work with, who are coming from areas of social deprivation in our local community, whether it's from prescription drugs just not being available to social services struggling to with demand. The probation service have had some incredible cutbacks to their service over the last eight years. They've just gone through another probation reset where they're dealing with early release. There's a lot of real problems, and we have a huge accommodation problem in South Devon, a crisis, really, as there is across Britain. But yeah, so there's some real challenges that we see every single day.
EM: Yeah, have you found your work as a charity has been impacted by the early release schemes and some of the prison reforms?
CP: I think indirectly, yes. We've watched probation officers’ caseloads go up. [There have been] moments in time where they've been so, so busy that I'm surprised someone still wants to work in that service, but there are many, many good probation officers and doing an excellent job. Referrals are increasing all the time for us. At the moment, we're experiencing a high number of referrals, more than we will be able to deal with.
EM: In which case, would you refer them onto different charities that do similar work?
CP: I would if we could, if there were any, to be honest, there aren't many. I don't really know of anything that's quite similar to Landworks, certainly not in this area. And we're unusual in that we work with people, you know, eight hours a day, five days a week. There are other organisations around who might be able to meet up for an hour or so in a coffee shop or a walk in the park, and I think that's a very significant difference between Landworks and other organisations like that-- that we have somewhere to be and something to do, and that in eight hours, you can hear a lot of someone's life. It may not be that they want to tell anything between nine and ten o'clock. It may be between two and three o'clock that they suddenly feel comfortable to talk, to let out what the problem is. And building the community, being part of a community here, I think enables people to feel part of a wider community. Yeah, massively relearning a lot of skills, relearning a lot of social skills, yeah, perhaps even just learning social skills, actually, yeah.
EM: Yeah, definitely. It sounds really incredible. And I was wondering in terms of, like, getting volunteers and things like that, I know a lot of charities are facing a lot of difficulties in terms of recruiting volunteers at the moment -- have you faced a similar problem at Landworks?
CP: No. In fact, almost [the] opposite, actually, in that we get a lot of volunteers come forward. We get a tremendous number on almost on a daily basis, certainly weekly basis. We’ve had two or three asks and really lovely offers, of which we simply couldn't accept them all. And people are interested, and people are very attracted to Landworks, which is a great thing. I think people are very attracted to the sense of community that’s here. So yeah, we get a lot fo offers.
EM: That's really heartening to hear, actually, because, to be honest, it feels like a lot of the time we're reporting on volunteer shortages and things.
CP: Well, that's interesting, yeah…
EM: Yeah, not necessarily shortages, but just fewer people are able to generally volunteer now, because apparently other effects of like, the cost of living, crisis, post pandemic, people are just struggling, so they’ can’t even afford time to volunteer.
CP: Yeah, yeah. I think our requests for volunteering have been constant, if not steadily on the increase for us.
EM: Wow, that's really interesting.
CP: It's almost a management issue in itself. And you need to listen to people and what they want to offer-- you don't want them to go away and feel disheartened. [But] we can't offer voluntary placements here.
EM: No, that's really interesting. I wonder if it's also a little bit cause focused in the sense of, like, a lot of people are probably very interested in working with prisoners and prison rehab.
CP: I think that's true. And there's a lot of areas, you know, from creative writing to drama to coming digging soil here, planting, and taking part in the workshop, pottery. There's lots of offers-- jewelry making-- so people have a wide range, I think, of what of offers coming through.
EM: Yeah, wow, that's really good to hear, though. And do you also generally have any issues in terms of recruiting trustees and maintaining a complete Board of Trustees, because that's also something we reported on recently as a problem for a lot of charities?
CP: Yes, that's interesting, we know, but we have a small board of trustees. We have currently got six trustees, all very motivated, very enthused, very interested in Landworks, and have been from the very beginning, which has been great. Attracting new trustees -- we haven't struggled with [that]. We're also on the lookout for new trustees and people who can bring relevant experience. I mean, it's something we're very conscious of. So far it hasn't been a problem. Wow. Okay,
EM: Wow, ok, that's also great to hear. I mean, it sounds like even before the Charity Awards, you were probably doing very nicely! But in terms of the Charity Awards, has it has had an impact at all - what you feel the impact has been since you won?
CP: I think the impacts been massive in a number of ways. The judging and the interview… I came away thinking… I don't know what I came away thinking, other than maybe we had a very thorough grilling. Every part of the project had been investigated, and so to then hear that we'd won was incredible, and that we were up against so many really, really good charities. It was the fact that we could understand that the judges had really looked into this and with great diligence. So the validation meant even more.
EM: Yeah, yeah, definitely.
CP: It's made me think a lot about Landworks, and I think allowed me to look at it in a different way, to know that an outside organisation had looked at us with such scrutiny, and we'd come out of that, and they actually could understand our ethos and could understand how we were working, that they listened and then, well, they applauded it. That was marvellous. So, I think for everyone's motivation here, that was tremendous. It has, of course, helped us with being recognised by key partners. I think, of course, it helps with funders, because you've been looked at, scrutinised and validated -- that's incredibly helpful.
EM: Yeah, yeah, that's so good to hear. Yeah. I'm glad it's had such a positive impact. And in terms of the entering process, like what first inspired, like the charity, to enter the awards in the first place.
CP: Well, I think someone had told us about it, and they'd said, I think you should have a go.
EM: And you were like, yeah?
CP: Yes, I suppose. We didn't really know great deal about it. And actually, then looking at it, I thought, well, we will give this a go. And then I didn't really think that we would get particularly far, just because it was such a prestigious award, and it was national, and then to be nominated and shortlisted, that in itself, felt like a huge achievement, yeah, yeah, it was quite daunting in some respect.
EM: Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, I guess, it’s a national competition, and I don't know how many people actually enter, but I think it is a really long list. So, so, I guess you say you were surprised to be shortlisted?
CP: Yes, it's wonderful. No, absolutely, yeah, I really was. And to be… and then to look against who we were shortlisted against… just “we've been taken seriously!”
EM: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
CP: There's a really wonderful thing for a small charity… years where we've tried to show the way we're working, we've tried to show that that is a good way to deliver resettlement,
EM: Yeah…
CP: To get that validation, it was tremendous.
EM: Yeah, really special. I can imagine it gives that stamp of sort of official formality to the charity.
CP: Yeah, very much, yeah, yeah
EM: Yeah, it's really cool. I'm really glad to hear that. And in terms of any other charities that might like to enter-- do you have any tips for charities, especially small charities, I suppose, that are thinking of entering?
CP: Yeah, definitely. Well, first of all, take go for it. Definitely, yeah, go. Don't be put off at all by what might seem like quite a bit of process. And be the honest version of who you are. Just if you believe that your charity is doing something great, then go and explain it. Yeah, I really liked, I really valued the range the experience of all the judges. So, the 16 or 17 judges there, all bringing different areas of knowledge and experience. And I think that was very powerful. And you felt the felt nothing was left unturned, everything was looked at, everything was understood. And you know, if you feel you're doing, if you feel you're doing the right thing, go ahead, go enter.
EM: Yeah, yeah, no, that's pretty useful. I think… hopefully that will encourage more small charities [to go] on the short list. Yeah, and the winners, yeah, great. Yeah, no, that's great. Well, I mean that more or less brings me to the end of the questions I prepared and didn't prepare. Some of those questions were improvised based on interest, because it's just, yeah, such amazing work that you do. It's so interesting to hear about it in detail. And yeah, it's been such a pleasure to meet you and to speak to you.
CP: Well, it's been nice to talk to you as well.
EM: Thank you for listening to my chat with Chris Parsons. Please like and subscribe to the Civil Society podcast wherever you get your podcasts. There’s another Charity Awards themed episode that you can listen to from earlier this month with judging panel chair Chris Sherwood, and look out for another episode in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I hope you stay safe and well and please visit charity awards.co.uk to enter next year's awards!
