Simon Fulford, chief executive of Khulisa U.K., explains how and why his not-for-profit brought a successful South African prisoner reentry program to the United Kingdom.

SIMON FULFORD: You walk into an English prison, you’ve got a group of 10 young offenders. If you hand them anything more than one piece of paper, they would probably throw it back in your face.

ROBERT V. WOLF: Hi, I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. Today I’m with Simon Fulford, who is the chief executive of Khulisa U.K., a non-profit started in South Africa and dedicated to breaking the cycle of crime and violence. Welcome to New York – or maybe I should say welcome back, because I know you used to live here.

FULFORD: I did. So, I lived in New York from ’92 to the end of 2004 and loved it, it was brilliant.

WOLF: I was really interested to see that you were also an award winning photographer and that you’ve used your work as a photographer to engage the disabled community, and that you co-founded and directed a non-profit in New York called Art Start, that received a president service award from President Clinton in 1997.

FULFORD: That’s right.

WOLF: I wonder if you could explain how you see art as a way to empower underserved and disadvantaged communities.

FULFORD: I guess it’s empowering, I guess on multiple levels. On a personal level, often being given and having the opportunity to express hopes, fears, challenges, needs, in a way that is creative as opposed to verbal, that feels a bit more accessible, sometimes it’s less personally challenging, and often kind of from that, it can be very empowering for them to be able to then say – and now I’ve told you, or now I’ve shared this with you as an organization or you as a policy maker, you as a government service provider, and this is the – I’ve now expressed my needs, and hopefully you can help meet my needs.

WOLF: So it’s a blend of personal growth and advocacy.

FULFORD: Correct.

WOLF: In your current endeavor at Khulisa, you know its mission is to break the cycle of crime and violence. That’s a tall order.

FULFORD: It is.

WOLF: How does Khulisa work? And maybe you could start by explaining the South African connection, or its origin in South Africa.

FULFORD: So, Khulisa is a Zulu word which means “to nurture”. You know, the freedom had come to South Africa and the multi-racial elections. There was a huge increase and explosion in violent crime and my understanding from my colleagues there, is a lot of it sort of took society by surprise, that in a sense, a lot of the black community, and what they call colored community, kind of almost turned on themselves. So our founder, Leslie Ann van Selm, she founded the organization and the first program they ran was using traditional African storytelling techniques so it creates a rehabilitative tool and vehicle, sort of helping violent offenders reconnect with their cultural roots. A lot of this community has been totally decimated by apartheid and trying to use that as a tool to kind of have them see themselves as positive contributors to their communities.

WOLF: So these are people who are currently in prison, or they were returning from prison?

FULFORD: Well, they were currently in prison. It was part of their sort of pre-release and hopefully re-integration, as they call it in South Africa, re-integration into their communities. Fast forward 16 years. Colleagues in South Africa in one of the leading crime prevention NGOs – so they do a lot of work with young people, with children from their late teens to early 30s, gang diversion programs, getting young people to stay in education, helping them develop community projects. We then brought one of their program models, Silence the Violence, from South Africa to the U.K. in 2009 and we began to pilot test that in English prisons, in English schools, and in the community.

WOLF: So you brought one specific program of many that they have.

FULFORD: Yes, they have a whole raft of different programs and interventions that they run in various different settings, in schools, in community. When Khulisa was coming to England and talking about South Africa society, that has 20 times the U.K.s violent crime rate, has communities with 80 percent unemployment, it’s a very, very extreme – and extreme poverty and depravation. So there was a question posed. You’ve been very successful in South Africa in quite an extreme environment, a very fragile sort of social economic environment. Could your success be translated to a more modern, Western, developed society? And with many more resources.

WOLF: That’s an interesting question too, that I don’t think many people ask. because usually when you think of exporting an idea from one country to another, there seems to be a tendency to think that it would go from a more developed, supposedly – I don’t know what the proper word to describe it would be – but a country with more resources, or a so-called first world country, to perhaps a country that in many areas was less developed. So it’s interesting.

FULFORD: It is an interesting model and I wouldn’t say we’re unique in that, there are some other examples of it, but it is a new way of looking at it. I think it’s quite subversive in some way, because the traditional development model is very much the west – America, western Europe, Japan, whatever, the more “developed” countries, exporting their models of social development to, you know, the less developed “third world countries”, and saying we’ve developed all the right solutions and you now go through them. And of course, interestingly, if not ironically, a lot of less developed countries struggle to implement some of the systems and processes that more developed countries can do. A lot of it has to do with resourcing. They are very under-resourced environments.

WOLF: So tell me, what is the program and how has it been working?

FULFORD: So the program is Silence the Violence. We have a youth version that we call Face It. It’s a very intensive, motivational, behavior change program. It focuses on violent behavior, but in many ways it’s about motivating participants to really understand themselves, to understand the triggers to their violent and criminal behavior, to understanding – in a sense – the excuses and the value systems and belief systems – belief with a small b – that allow them to behave in certain ways or propel them to behave in certain ways, and beginning to try to challenge those or unpick them, so that they can make better choices for themselves, better choices for family or community, and certainly better choices for their future. We work on a theory of violence developed by, actually, an American forensic psychologist, Dr. James Gilligan. His approach is that violence is a learned behavior for the majority of individuals who don’t have a mental health problem or challenge, or psychosis. If it’s a learned behavior, then it can be unlearned. It doesn’t mean it can be unlearned overnight, but you have to star that process and our program is a very intense, short duration, high intensity program to trigger the beginning of that change process.

WOLF: Is it therapy group? Counseling? Classes?

FULFORD: That’s a very good question. It’s a group-led process. We use a lot of therapeutic techniques, and so we use a lot of drama therapy, creative art therapy. It is based on cognitive behavior therapy techniques, and very much the group, the participants actually, they provide the content. Their stories, their lives, their experiences become the content that either the group works through as a group and individually, and by doing role play, by making masks, and making hats that represent violent signs themselves, and making kind of the original self that they would like to be through those kind of different creative techniques, sharing and having a dialogue around it that moves them to a place that they would very much understand more of who they are, more of the connection of themselves and having been victims of abuse and neglect in their own lives, or witnesses of abuse and neglect and violence.

WOLF: So how’s it been going? How’s the implementation, and what have the results been so far?

FULFORD: So, it’s been a really fun journey of meeting, you know, a healthy level of sort of interest and certainly a healthy level of skepticism. And I would say it’s been a resounding positive opinion of how it works. In that the participants themselves say it is one of the most profoundly impactful programs they’ve ever been in, we’ve had academics evaluate and assess, certainly the short term impact on behavior change that it can have a – when it works well, when the group dynamics work – that it can have a profound impact on propensity for violence and reducing aggressive tendencies, and improving emotional well-being, that can be built on for individuals thinking positively about their lives, and engaging in other rehabilitation programs – job training, drug and alcohol, substance use programs, etc. We haven’t had the ability to do the long-term tracking on recidivism. Mostly we just haven’t had the resources to do that. We’ve received some high profile grants for innovation in the justice center, and we’re implementing one of those current projects now.

WOLF: Oh, a new project.

FULFORD: Yeah, it’s a combination of our Silence the Violence work with Through the Gate mentoring to hopefully really embed behavior changes and learning of an offender once they’ve been released into the community.

WOLF: I see. So – because it does sound like Silence the Violence is sort of laying a foundation that would, perhaps, require continued engagement around other issues and job training or whatever. So it sounds like that’s what you’re moving – you’re developing now.

FULFORD: Yes. So we’re adding in a rigorous process of referral from our program onto other service provision, or bringing in a volunteer mentor who can support that individual, on a more personal way – meeting them once a week, talking to them on the phone, you know, encouraging them to have goals and sticking to their goals about applying for jobs.

WOLF: And have you encountered any challenges related to translating the model from South Africa? Perhaps cultural differences? Or have you had to make particular tweaks?

FULFORD: At its core, the program content and the curriculum design was wholly transferrable. And a lot of that is because it’s not a South Africa program, it’s universal therapeutic techniques, it’s cognitive behavior therapy, it’s drama therapy, it’s kind of creative art therapy techniques. What is unique about the program is the way we’ve sequenced it and our approach with this sort of high intensity, short duration, and then using what are a few more traditional, indigenous tools such as the mask making, you know? I mean I know in ancient England they wore painted faces and things like that, but they haven’t done it for about 2,000 years. Whereas in Africa, masks are still very much part of the culture in rituals and ceremonies. So the mask making is potentially something that came more from South Africa, but it’s therefore very interesting and novel in England. We use a hat making, which again is a slightly different approach, and then we have what we call the wisdom circle, which is again a more African tradition of sitting in a circle at the community, resolving an issue and having a talking piece that they pass around the circle. What we did remove from the program in its adaptation was obviously a lot of the cultural references. A poem about South Africa doesn’t translate to London, I have to say, and even less so to Manchester – if anyone knows their English geography. What was also quite interesting is in South Africa, the prison system is so under-resourced that their approach to running the program is often quite didactic. So they can go in, there are 20 guys in the program, they can hand them a program manual to the offenders that was as thick as a phone book, and they would cherish it and hold it, and they were thankful that someone was coming to do anything. You walk into an English prison, you’ve got a group of 10 young offenders. If you hand them anything more than one piece of paper, they would probably throw it back in your face. It was a very different approach.

WOLF: So you have to prove yourself?

FULFORD: You really have to prove yourself. You’ve got to really build and gain the trust of the group, and it has to be earned, whereas in South Africa there’s more generosity with the group giving you the trust from the outset, and it’s kind of yours to lose, whereas in England it’s – you’ve got to gain it. And so we work on gaining it as quickly as possible.

WOLF: Well thank you so much for explaining your programming at Khulisa U.K. and good luck with your future endeavors.

FULFORD: Thank you very much.

WOLF: I’ve been speaking with Simon Fulford, who is the chief executive of Khulisa U.K. I’m Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation. You’ve been listening to one of our New Thinking podcasts and you can listen to more at www.courtinnovation.org. You can also listen to us on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.