Our story starts in 2019 with one woman.
Caroline Struik-Kramer founded Beyond Bars Institute. Caroline has been fascinated by criminal behaviour from an early age. She sees crime as a symptom, and likes to search for the cause, intending to prevent it. As a secondary school teacher in her twenties, she focused on the students with undesirable behaviour. She wanted to know where it came from and motivated them to choose the right path and helped them to get there. As a psychiatric nurse, she opted for forensic psychiatry.
In 2012 Caroline and her husband started a home care company specialised in psychiatry or addiction problems. Together with 800 employees, they provided care to approximately 4000 clients. In 2018 her company was transferred to the Dutch largest homecare organisation.
Caroline wanted to focus more on the prison system, so Beyond Bars Institute was founded 1 year later. Being an international NLP ( Neuro-Linguistic Programming) Trainer combined with her experience working with people with criminal behaviour, she developed an educational prison program. In October 2020 Emma Molenaar, from Australia, joined Beyond Bars Institute as director and international trainer.
In the meantime, they gathered like-minded trainers from different countries. Passionate people with an affinity for the prison system and with the same motto: Transform the planet into a future we all would love to be part of. Together they want to bring the program to as many prisons in the world as possible.
The people of Beyond Bars Institute want to contribute to a safer future for everybody and guide prisoners to a better future of their own.