HeartWork began in 2002 with one classroom inside a Gauteng correctional facility, eighteen participants, and a stubborn conviction that prison time did not have to be wasted time. Once we started working with men, we realised that rehabilitation programmes assume a man already knows what is driving him. The men we sat down with that first year had never been helped to understand the influences behind their decision making, the trauma, the destructive thinking patterns, the addiction, the peer pressure, the hopelessness. Almost no one had ever shown them practical alternatives for living responsibly and with purpose.
Twenty three years later, that conviction has not changed. Neither has our reason for the work. Most incarcerated people will eventually return to society. If the underlying causes of their behaviour are not addressed, many will re-offend, continuing the cycle of crime, broken families, and unsafe communities. So we work directly on the underlying causes, hand in hand with the Correctional Facilities Social Work Department, addressing the personal level that traditional interventions alone often cannot reach.
Today the programme runs in five Gauteng correctional facilities and serves roughly 240 participants every year. In 2025 we rebuilt everything. The new curriculum compresses the journey into 18 weeks, replaces written essays with daily habit cards, anchors every week in a physical metaphor any participant can hold in his hand, and produces a structured, anonymised data trail. For the first time in 23 years, we can measure what we have always known qualitatively, and show it to the participant, his parole board, and our funders, with the same evidence in everyone's hands.
