There is no monopoly on brilliance. We love this saying and we're sticking to it.
Offploy is a peer-led organisation, meaning we were formed by and employ a large percentage of the people we support; people with criminal convictions. In one instance, this makes us experts through experiencing the criminal justice system, disclosing our convictions, and securing employment.
However, expertise through experience is not exclusive to people with criminal convictions contributing to our organisation. We have incredibly talented people with both academic and life experience who all contribute to our social mission of reducing reoffending by placing people with criminal convictions into meaningful, mentored and sustainable employment.
Commissioners
With our expertise through experience, commissioners can expect a range of contributions from Offploy, such as: how some of our team and candidates have previously experienced your service as participants; you can expect incredible graphs and data analysis from our academics who use this data to influence our service; and you can expect exceptional levels of service from some of the most experienced caseworkers from both the private and public sectors.
We will also need to draw on your expertise and experience to improve our service. This could be anything from how best to work with your team, to how we monitor the quality of our delivery to meet your standards. You may even see ways in which we could improve our delivery. Any feedback like this would be most welcomed.
Colleagues
You are the experts through experience. Our commitment is to offer equal opportunities to people with lived experience, yet always choose the best candidates for the job. We will not aim for a set percentage of our team to have criminal convictions. Instead, we will aim for the strongest team possible that is dedicated to reducing reoffending and making society safer.
We rely on our colleagues to give feedback on anything that needs improvement in our service or our leadership. We are also keen to learn from your other skills outside of the work environment. Perhaps you love graphic design and think we could produce more content to inform people of our service, or perhaps you’re an amazing knitter and think we could offer courses to our learners. Either way, we want your expertise. We want you to become experts on Offploy so that we can constantly improve our service.
Candidates
We are only experts through experience because we constantly rely on the feedback of the people we are supporting. If you are not an expert in the service and support you provide, then no one is.
It is for this reason that we will ask for your help in improving our service in equal parts by offering you an expert service designed to help you navigate the world of securing employment with a criminal conviction.
You will have some great ideas and we need to implement them in our service. Just like our ‘care enough to confront’ value we really do appreciate the feedback, which keeps us sharp and enables us to be the experts through experience.
Overall
We are proud of what we have learnt and achieved in our four years of service, but we recognise we still have a long way to go until we’re a sector leader in being experts through experience. If you have any thoughts on how we could improve our ability to be experts through experience, please email us on website@offploy.org. You can read about our other values here.