£1 becomes £8.54 for St Giles Trust

Setting the scene

St Giles Trust is a charity which aims to break the cycle of prison, crime and disadvantage.

Founded in 1962 - originally as The Camberwell Samaritans in the crypt of St Giles Church in Camberwell, south London - it offers a range of services, both in prison and in the community.

The Trust’s aim is to help the 16,000 clients they work with each year overcome myriad barriers which might be holding them back from moving their lives forward in a positive way. By the mid 2000s, St Giles Trust had developed community-based services in Kent and Ipswich, with further hubs in Cardiff and Leeds.

How we helped

St Giles Trust wanted to understand, value and clearly demonstrate the societal benefits generated by their activities and asked for our help to do this.

After consulting with the charity, we selected St Giles Trust’s iconic ‘Peer Advisor’ programme to be analysed for this purpose. The charity’s peer advisors are either prisoners, who provide initial support in custody for prisoners, or community-based ex-offenders who give continued support in the community, once clients are released.     

The selection of the Peer Advisor initiative was made because the Trust believed that this programme generated the desired impacts considered integral to the charity’s cause - for example increased employment, reduced reoffending and increased human capital through training. We then worked with them to gather data on this programme across these, and other, impact areas.

Using our Total Impact Measurement and Management (‘TIMM’) framework, we estimated the monetary value of the charity’s social contribution across the impact areas: their Social Return on Investment or ‘SROI’.

We estimated that for every £1 invested in St Giles Trust, approximately £8.54 of benefits is generated through a mixture of benefits to the individuals targeted by the charity, benefits to wider society and savings to the public purse.