Summer time with Compass

The vision of Compass is to ‘love every young prisoner in Ireland away from re-offending and towards a new life’. 

As the school finishes for summer in Wheatfield Prison, a lot of the young men we work with in our Compass programme find themselves with a lot of free time. Using this opportunity we aim to provide these young men with a variety of refreshing and engaging activities. 
Now, with the long summer evenings and the weather warming up a little, we have gotten the chance to host some football matches on the prison grounds where we bring in an outside team to play the young men in an 11-a-side match. These matches are always great fun, even if there is some healthy competition between the two teams! 

We also take this opportunity to continue with our music production programme which has proven to be very popular. CreateSound provide us with a laptop and production software to help the young men create their own musical track over the course of four hour long sessions. The young men involved in this programme begin by making their own tune, which some of the braver ones then develop in to a full track by recording vocals and/or rapping. This is a great way for these guys to showcase their talents and when their track is completely finished we can produce an MP3 file for them so they can listen back and share with their friends and family.  

At Compass we are not only operating in Wheatfield Prison this summer, but we are also part of the Oberstown Dentention Centre Summer Camp. We regularly attend the summer camp there with the music production technology and work with those aged 15-17 to create their own tracks. We find that this is a great way to have some fun with these young people and to keep them focused on something creative and rewarding.