Trustees Week – Blog by Trustee, Ron Crank MBE

I have been a Trustee of Nacro since the autumn of 2015 and there has never been a time that I have not felt an immense amount of pride in the work that the Nacro teams achieve.
This year, like for everyone else, has been the most strange, weird and frustrating for all of us within the Nacro charity. Having to invent and create new and innovative ways of achieving our goals to change, sustain and maintain the way we work has been achieved with a set of excellent innovative and mind-blowing ways.

Nacro has a wide diaspora of clients and service users from the very north of England to the very south and east of the country. We house our service users, we educate them, we try and ensure their health is as well thought out as it could be and we work hard to support ex-offenders in all of the above and we try to assist them in getting a job.

Our great teams of staff work so hard to ensure that the environment is conducive to learning, living, and hopefully working. They have close contact with their clients and always seem to be in close contact in a most marvellous supportive way.

My role as Trustee is predominantly to ensure we do what we say we do and to work with the senior team to come up with ideas, to support new viable initiatives and to make sure we try and visit the many locations we occupy. I have enjoyed visits to Newcastle, Medway, Bolton, Middlesborough, North Wales, Carlisle, Boston and many, many more. Each of these locations was unique and incredibly special. I visited classes of mums to be, art courses, safeguarding tuition, maths lessons, building and car mechanics. I worked with offenders attending a gardening class in Medway. I learned of the loneliness of someone who was on bail 200 miles from home. All of these visits, of course, have had to stop due to COVID-19.

Nacro has its challenges, life has its challenges and to be an effective Trustee it is necessary to be aware of the pressure and stress running a diverse organisation and to ensure we have the capacity to manage in these particularly difficult times.

Ron Crank MBE
Vice Chairman and Trustee, Nacro