Dear reader,
We hope you’ve had a great week.
We’re a bit late to publish this Friday edition. Too many interviews with too many interesting people today pushed everything back! So please accept out apologies.
Today’s main story below focuses in on a story many know already, that The Nelson Trust celebrates 40 years this year. What many don’t know is the story of how it beat off a major billion pound turnover business to double in size almost overnight.
It’s story that came to light when we were lucky enough to interview the in-coming chief executive officer of the Stroud-based charity, learn more about the incredible work it does, and how it manages to punch above its weight as an effective force for change.
We also asked a national organisation involved in the same work - delivering support and hope to those in the most desperate of circumstances - what makes the Trust special and why it is proud to partner with it.
It is life-changing, life-saving stuff that sends positive ripples through the lives of many. And it’s all the result of an organisation born and bred here in Gloucestershire.
Oh, and we were delighted to say that as we peeled back the layers of the story we discovered at its heart was also a very close friend of The Raikes Journal. You’ll have to read on to find out who.
It’s all inspirational stuff, and we hope a positive one to provide you with some food for thought this weekend.
And speaking of the weekend, have a good one.
Remember, for every person you refer to The Raikes Journal’s email service you get points towards a free membership allowing you to see beyond our paywalls. Please do sign up (free or otherwise), send the referral link to a friend or colleague, and help us grow.
Andrew Merrell (editor).
If you have a story, an issue, a news item, a charity or an interview you want us to write about or investigate, challenge the powers that be on, then please email me: andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.
NB: We believe Raikes now publishes probably the best-read business-related email ‘newsletter’, pound for pound, in Gloucestershire. Readership is growing and 2025 looks good!
Your briefing notes…
📢 Back when I first relaunched The Raikes Journal I had the pleasure of speaking to Jane Roberts, a woman tirelessly devoted to raising awareness and helping put into place support for people with ADHD and their families. The heartbreaking story she told me, which became the backbone of the article, was about her son, his struggles as a result of the condition, and how he came to end his own life. She was prepared to retell it to publicise her bid to launch what is called the Gloucestershire Youth Neurodiversity Project, being run by Gloucestershire Community Foundation. It’s a ground-breaking project that she hopes will lead to the county becoming the best place in the country to live if you have ADHD. She has self-funded much of the work and is now looking for organisations to deliver a pilot project for the first year. She is incredible. You can find out more here. And read our big interview from early 2024 here.
🏆 Sophie McCall, another of the very early interviewees for The Raikes Journal when it relaunched back in 2024, had reason to celebrate this week. She’s been shortlisted in this year’s Security Excellence Awards, staged by The Channel Company. McCall, who founded the Security Queens blog and works for the a global cyber security company NCC Group, is shortlisted in the Security Rising Star category. Her NCC Group colleague, Sian John, is shortlisted in the Security Woman of the Year award and the firm’s Group Project Clover (TikTok) team is shortlisted for the Security Team of the Year award. You can read our interview with Sophie McCall here.
😕 On Monday we took a look at Gloucester City Homes decision to point the finger of blame at Gloucester City Council as pressure mounted over whether it would get its regeneration plans for Podsmead, an area just South of the city centre, to planning in time to capitalise on £20 million of funding. As we said, there was more to the story than met the eye. Something was not right. The just a couple of days later GCH was retracting a letter it sent out to residents in Kingsholm that appeared to suggest they might be liable to service charges related to the maintenance of nearby communal land that had not previously been charged - even though many were not actually GCH customers. Confusion reigned, the leader of the city council - already a little perturbed as a result of the previous week's accusations -gladly got involved, as did the city’s MP, Alex McIntyre. The letter was withdrawn. No one remains any the wiser.
💷 On Monday we also named the incoming chief executive officer of Gloucestershire County Council as Jo Walker. Walker will move from her current post as leader of North Somerset County Council in May. She’s lived in Gloucestershire for 36 years. What’s emerged since, courtesy of the BBC local government report Carmelo Garcia, is how much she will be paid - £189,000! If it needed anymore dressing up to catch your eye Garcia points out that is £17,000 more than the Prime Minister Keir Starmer gets paid and eight times more than the lowest paid worker at the local authority. Her salary is apparently in the range advertised for the role and benchmarked against other comparator councils. So there you go.
💷 That residents across Gloucestershire would be facing higher council tax bills became apparent this week. Without confusing you too much, bills are going up by an estimated 2.99 per cent for residents in Stroud District Council, more than five per cent for those in Wotton-under-Edge, by an estimated £6.15 for those in the Forest of Dean to £211.95 (for a Band D property), with Gloucestershire County Council increasing its proportion of everyone's overall bill by 4.99 per cent to £1,679.65.
Sporting and other highlights this weekend…
Friday:
🎶💃🏽🕺🏾 A hidden festival - right under your very noses! Cotswold Water Park Hotel is staging a jazz, funk and soul weekender from tonight. Expect to party, in some style, with more than 600 others!
🧀🍷 There’s cheese and wine tasting from 6pm at The Cheeseworks, 5 Regent Street, Cheltenham.
Saturday:
⚽ Gloucester City AFC play Pool Town FC at away at 3pm.
⚽ Forest Green Rovers FC play Woking FC at home at 3pm.
⚽ Cheltenham Town play Newport County away at 3pm.
Sunday:
🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️ Tewkesbury Abbey will continue to stage its Peace Doves art installation, created by renowned sculptor Peter Walker. It runs until 27 February and featured 8,000 paper doves adorned with messages of peace from the community.
📷🖼️Gloucester Cathedral continues to celebrate the work of photography until Thursday 27 February during Cathedral opening hours.
* The Raikes Journal is a community interest company. Everything you read by us is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.
If you subscribe and invite friends to The Raike Journal you will earn rewards towards complimentary membership (three referrals will get you one month, 10 will get you three months and 25 will win you six months).
If you upgrade to paid you’ll be part of this CIC too. We are dedicated to delivering quality journalism for Gloucestershire, to championing the county, in particular its businesses, charities, education and training providers, and to helping create an even stronger community. If you upgrade to paid you will be able to see past the paywalls often put on our second and third email editions of the week, that lock all our archive after two weeks and lock our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire series. You will be able to comment on our stories too. You’ll be helping make this CIC sustainable to deliver more original articles on our county.
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How a Gloucestershire charity beat a £billion business to double in size
An interview with the in-coming CEO of The Nelson Trust in its 40th year has revealed not just her own journey, but the charity’s life-saving work, an incredible contract win - and a familiar face as catalyst.
By Andrew Merrell.
This is a significant year for The Nelson Trust, the Gloucestershire-headquartered charity that supports people with dependency issues and more – much more. It celebrates its 40th year.
It’s been an astonishing journey that began in a converted Five Valleys pub (hence the name) and today is an operation dedicated to offering ‘holistic, trauma-informed and gender specific support’ to thousands of individuals annually across the South West and Wales.
That support is delivered via four single-gendered residential treatment centres for abstinence-based recovery, three more housing units for those leaving treatment and five community projects as part of its Hub enterprises.
These include the Hub Academy in Stroud and The Sober Parrot cafe in Cheltenham, with all of them offering training and work experience for what the Trust calls the recovery community to help build lifelong skills and return successfully to society.
In 2010, after years of paving the way for gender responsive support throughout the UK, the Trust also opened its first women’s centre in Gloucester, providing holistic support to women leaving prison, and women in the community on probation orders, as an alternative to custody.
And that’s still only part of what it does - its work now also outside Gloucestershire, a sign not just of the recognition of its success, but the ambition of its leadership team.
The Raikes Journal was lucky enough to speak to its incoming chief executive officer, Christina Line, who helped us understand how the charity has developed, the recognition it now gets and partnerships that make it all possible.
And through talking to others too it led us to understand how that success is being driven by a focus on staff development, and how it is using a Gloucestershire business to achieve that - one we are also very familiar with here at Raikes.
Plus, we got the inside track on how that partnership delivered a knockout blow to one of the UK’s biggest firms in a truly David v Goliath-like contract battle.
A contract that jet-propelled the Trust’s growth! We’ll get into all that and more below
“The Trust now has a 12 million turnover and has undergone significant growth in the last few years. We now support over 5,000 people annually,” said Line, who until she takes over her new role remains chief operating officer.
She been with the charity for more than a decade now, and integral to its growth as it has sought to shape its services and build the relationships with all stakeholders that make itse work so effective.
That work remains at the very forefront helping to change attitudes for the better, especially around the treatment of women caught up in drugs, alcohol, abusive relationships, prostitution and the criminal justice system.
“We have helped develop best-practice for working with women in difficult circumstances and delivering better outcomes,” said Line, who referenced the ground-breaking review of vulnerable women in the criminal justice system, carried out in 2006 by Baroness Jean Corston for helping explain the value and potential of the work it does and drive change.
The review made 43 recommendations about the treatment of women in the criminal justice system and argued “the need for a distinct radically different, visibly-led, strategic, proportionate, holistic, woman-centred, integrated approach”.
It focused more generally on vulnerable female offenders, recognising a large proportion of were mothers, and recognising the effects of imprisonment on their children, recommending those young people should be taken into consideration by the criminal justice system.
It is this that has helped the trust help women to break destructive behaviour and find ways to rebuild, reconnect and live meaningful lives again.
“It can cost perhaps £50,000 a year to keep a women in prison. We can help provide rehabilitation for about £3,000 to £4,000,” said Line.
It is truly difficult and challenging work on all fronts – personally, for all involved, and financially for the organisations trying to deliver sustainable services.
How on earth does it actually work?
“We have incredible passionate and dedicated staff,” she added.
What Line neglected to say, and what Raikes found out afterwards through others, is that the trust’s expansion into South Wales was a true David and Goliath moment.
The charity pitched for a contract to deliver its services across the border and found itself in the ring with an industry giant with major resource and an annual turnover close to a billion pounds.
“It was bidding for a contract that was half the size of its existing turnover. It was for the whole of Wales – and it was up against G4S.
“And the Welsh Government was asking what each bidder had done towards particular sustainable development goals,” Dr Stewart Barnes, the ceo of leadership development specialists QuoLux.
Why does Barnes know this?
Kirsty Day, The Nelson Trust’s director of recovery, has been on QuoLux’s LEAD™, GOLD™ and GAIN™ leadership programmes, and the trust turned to Barnes’ Gloucester-based business for help in a consultancy capacity.
That’s how it came to use what QuoLux calls its Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) configurator, a digital tool that helps a business align what it does with the United Nation’s SDGs (sustainable development goals).
It helps firms demonstrate in a meaningful way how they’re focusing on areas like people, operations, social innovation and how its leaders create lasting impact and ‘ensure a sustainable future for generations to come’.
It’s a tool that allows a business to spell out what QuoLux calls the ‘good dividends’ it is delivering, and to understand how those actions benefit its bottom line.
“Basically, it allowed The Nelson Trust to demonstrate the social value it delivers,” said Barnes.
It proved a key differentiator for the Welsh Government and the trust walked away with the five-year rolling contract, delivering a 50 per cent boost to its turnover.
According to the trust it’s meant more women’s centres, more help supporting women at a point of crisis and that’s resulted in reduced reoffending, homelessness, pressures on services like the NHS and other statutory services, reduced harm and substance use.
It’s kept more families together safely, disrupting intergenerational cycles of abuse, substance use and offending.
Line has been with the charity for 10 years, a graduate in psychology and criminology from the University of Gloucestershire, who worked her way up from an initial role as rural outreach worker.
She’s made a success of roles including team lead, service manager, women's community service business development manager, director of partnerships and development and head of business development.
And it was Line who helped develop the ideas of the women’s centres that help identify and work with vulnerable women, many at risk from predatory gangs and known to the police.
Those safe havens aim to offer a way out for women, by creating a network of communication across all manner of agencies.
For most of us the leafy rolling hills of Gloucestershire and relative wealth of the county don’t fit with such stories, but they are here and many – our eyes just don’t see them, or we choose not to.
A clue to Line’s ambition to continue making an impact is in her CV. Today she also holds an MBA from the same county university and she sits on The Howard League for Penal Reform.
When she takes over from current ceo John Trolan later this year she will take the reigns at an organisation which now runs nine centres across England and Wales, in Swindon, Somerset, Bristol, and a first of its kind inside HMP Eastwood Park; as well as more recently centres in Newport, Swansea, Cardiff and a mini centre in Dyfed Powys, as lead partners of One Wales, established in 2024.
Although Line knew the organisation inside out and was brandishing an MBA she returned turned to a familiar name to make sure she stood out.
QuoLux’s consultancy helped her prepare for an interview series which saw her in the ring with outstanding candidates from across the country.
QuoLux is also about to begin working with the Nelson Trust to help take all 250 of its staff through its How To programme, contained in its e-learning library.
One of the great strengths of the Trust that has also helped it grow and be effective is its ability to work with other organisations.
“We are now working with 43 different women's centres nationally, helping support the range of services they deliver. We are part of a network of women’s centres that collaborate, share learning and best practice,” said Line.
One such group is Via. Based in Harlow. It organisation started life 30 years ago as the Westminster Drug Project (WDP), changing its name in 2023 in recognition it now supports adults and young people across the UK around their mental health, sexual health.
We asked Via why it worked with the Gloucestershire charity. Its answer was comprehensive, and name-dropped Line too.
Anna Whitton, CEO of Via, said: “We approached The Nelson Trust a couple of years ago to explore how we might work in partnership to meet a significant gap for women who needed access to residential detox services.
“We knew that their organisation had important expertise in the delivery of services for women, in women-only residential rehab services and in drug and alcohol service delivery.
“What we knew about them made us feel like they were likely to be a good partner for Via. Essentially, we needed to understand whether our culture, values and approach were a good fit.
“Christina was part of our initial meeting, and it was clear from the start that as leaders in our respective organisations, we were going to be able to work together well.
“We shared an ambition – address a much-needed gap in the system – and recognised and respected the strengths that both organisations could bring to a partnership.
“There are some significant overlaps in our organisations’ strengths and expertise, so there was of course a possibility that this could create a competitive tension.
“However, we were able to have transparent and honest conversations about who was best placed to deliver the different elements of the partnership, with the focus always being about doing the right thing for the women that we work alongside.
“When the Gloucestershire Integrated Drug and Alcohol Services came out to tender, The Nelson Trust was an obvious partner for us, and we were delighted to have been successful in that tender process.
“This new service is heading towards the end of its first year now and our partnership continues to strengthen, underpinned by honesty, integrity, and a focus on finding solutions with and for local people.
“Christina and the senior team at The Nelson Trust are key to our working relationship and to making the partnership a success.
“They are genuinely exciting to work with and I know we’ll make lots of important things happen together.”
* The story of how The Nelson Trust won the contract is about to be featured as one of the case studies in a forthcoming book by QuoLux, due out in March, called ‘Really Good Growth’.