A social enterprise worker from Bolton has been awarded a Churchill Fellowship to travel to the USA and research entrepreneurship opportunities for ex-offenders.

David Morgan, who has worked in the justice sector for six years, wants to gain an insight into the funding, recruitment and personal development within American prison entrepreneurship programmes.

“I have seen first hand the challenges faced by men and women with criminal convictions seeking to move on after release and not be held back by their past,” he said.

Working with British prisons that currently provide education, David wants to use his research to set up a similar project in the UK to give more ex-offenders access to high quality mentoring.

“I spent a lot of my working life in a corporate environment where profit was the main driver and now I want to put the people first.”

David is one of nine Greater Manchester residents to be awarded the fellowship this year, including a pharmacist, a broadcast journalist and a police sergeant.

Each year, 150 Churchill Fellowships are awarded by The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, a charity set up in 1965 as a public memorial to Churchill’s leadership

The Greater Manchester winners will be researching topics such as plastic pollution, teaching computing in African-Caribbean communities and an all-female expedition to the North Pole.

Between them, they will receive grants worth over £50,000 and travel across four continents.

Applications for next year’s Fellowships will open on April 27.

For more information, see wcmt.org.uk