Over the years, The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust has been a significant source of support for practitioners and academics seeking to improve public services in UK society.
Each year, up to 150 Travelling Fellowships are awarded to any UK citizen who is over 18 and proposes a project that will provide a significant impact on our society. The project can be in any field of interest to the applicant and a list of topics can be seen on their website.
In our context, the Trust supports projects that investigate international approaches and enable the sharing of best practice within emergency service provision, forensic science, legal services and prison reform, for example.
In March, the Trust announced those who were successfully awarded 2019 Churchill Travelling Fellowships, including:
- Sally-Ann Ashton – scoping US gang interventions
- Gary Beautridge – artificial intelligence in policing
- Bob Blemmings – suicide prevention at bridges
- Rachel Bolton-King – advancing gun crime technologies
- Zoe Cadwell – applying fingermark development to forensic archaeology
- Lorna Fergus – DNA preservation during police search
- Lucina Hackman – forensic science, practitioners and the courts
- Philip Robinson – missing persons investigations
- James Rowlands – reviewing intimate partner homicide
- William Willson – county lines and tackling exploitation
If you are interested in any of these projects, click on their name to get in touch with them and click on the topic of their project to access their blog.
Previous Churchill Fellows have covered a wide variety of topics of relevance to the Research4Justice community, including prisoner rehabilitation, challenges in policing, improvements to sexual offence reporting, mental health support and suicide prevention intitiatives.
The reports from some Fellowships can be accessed online and download for reading. You can search the Trust’s report library using specific keywords, categories and even countries of interest to see the full range of projects that the Trust has supported over the years. Some downloadable examples include:
- The operation of body farms (2017)
- Crime reduction through fingermark visualisation best practice (2014)
- How prison officers experience and survive prison (2017)
- Alternative approaches ti imprisoning mothers of young children (2016)
- Mental health, policing and peer support (2016)
- The fight against modern slavery and human trafficking (2017)
- How training and engagement influence judges’ decisions (2014)
By searching the Trust’s Directory of Fellows you will also discover more about the 2018 Fellows who have just completed their travels. Obviously, due to the nature of our research, you may need to contact a Fellow directly to gain access to their findings if their reports were unsuitable for sharing online.
Have you been inspired to apply for a Fellowship yourself? Then please read the application section of their website where you can register to be informed when applications open on 16 May 2019 for 2020 Fellowships. The categories to which you can apply are extensive and there is also an open category, so your project really can be about anything.
Lots of time left to get your ideas going and good luck with your applications!
