UpFamilies

The incarceration experience represents economic, social and psychological impacts for the families of people in prison. The prisoners’ families are among the most vulnerable and disadvantaged populations in society, experiencing multidimensional and intersectional forms of inequality (Western and Pettit, 2010).

Many of the consequences on prisoners’ families can be alleviated by some moderators, such as the support provided by non-governmental organizations, welfare policies and social services (Condry & Smith, 2018). The problem is that most of the time these families lack awareness on where and how to look for this support.

The UpFamilies project aims are to provide to prisoners’ families a compendium of existing services available, from local to national, which can help them to cope with imprisonment impacts. The services’ up-to-date information will be made available using a mobile application. 

At the same time, the project intends to create awareness on the importance of capacity building of the organisations that daily work with these families, so they can be better prepared for their unique needs.

This project is co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union (Agreement number: 2021-1-ES01-KA220-ADU-000025967)

UpFamilies website: https://upfamilies.eu

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Objectives

UpFamilies’ main focus is to build social capital by reinforcing the role community organisations play in the social inclusion of both these specific families and prisoners upon release, training these organisations for excellence. To do that, several objectives were created, such as:

• Developing a roadmap on existing services and programmes that better meet the needs of prisoners’ families.
• Creating a mobile application with existing services and programmes available for prisoners’ families.
• Increasing the number of prisoners’ families that use the mobile application, fighting against info-exclusion.
• Creating a network of institutions and professionals that work with prisoners’ families, promoting alliances and cooperation between all.
• Promoting good practices regarding the already available services to provide support to prisoners’ families.
• Contributing to the improvement of the services provided to prisoners’ families.
• Increasing awareness among citizenship on the needs of these families, making available a training manual to mobilise the community’s capacity to provide informal support and assistance to prisoners’ families.