Shannon Trust
charity promoting literacy in prisons
The Shannon Trust provides adults who have had negative early life educational experiences with a second chance at learning to read and obtain numeracy skills.
Founding
The Shannon Trust was founded in 1997 by Christopher Morgan MBE, a farmer from Sussex. In the early 1990s he joined a pen friend scheme run by the Prison Reform Trust and began corresponding with a life sentenced prisoner, Tom Shannon.
Through Shannon's letters, Morgan learned about prison life and about the shocking levels of poor literacy amongst prisoners. In 1995 the letters were put together in a book titled, Invisible Crying Tree. The royalties from the sale of the book were used to found the Shannon Trust.
Reading plan
Morgan took his idea for the Shannon Reading Plan to the Director General of the Prison Service who was sceptical and challenged him to make it work in HMP Wandsworth, a notoriously busy prison in London. It took a further three years of experimentation before the Shannon Reading Plan really started to impact on the lives of non-reading prisoners.
In 2001, Neil Lodge, a prison officer at HMP Wandsworth, took an interest in the Shannon Reading Plan and by the end of the year he had developed a workable plan and produced 48 new readers. Lodge observed that those involved not only benefited from learning to read but also from increased confidence, raised self-esteem and improved behaviour.
The public source identifies “Shannon Trust” as charity promoting literacy in prisons. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Shannon, Trust and charity.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7763655. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997, 1995 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shannon Trust” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.