We do not work nationally and we do not work abroad. The Trust's mercy is geographically modest by design: the four English counties through which the community has walked since 1914 — and where, almost without exception, we know our partners by their first names.
Each county marks an abbey we once kept; the Trust's small grants honour that lineage by going almost entirely to charities within those borders. The map at right is, very roughly, what the year 2024 looked like.
A diagrammatic map. Distances and shapes are emblematic, not cartographic.
We have asked permission. Some names have been changed at the request of the families.
Sunday Doors volunteer Eilidh, a retired hospice nurse, has now visited Margaret every Wednesday afternoon for four and a half years. They have read forty-six issues of the parish magazine aloud, made (between them) some 230 cups of Yorkshire Gold, and laughed at all of the obituaries.
A 34-year-old Dix scholar from Cardiff found, while cataloguing a 1937 archive box, an unpublished letter from Dom Gregory Dix to the Bishop of Birmingham. His paper on it appeared in Studia Liturgica in March 2025. He is now writing his thesis on Anglican Papalism between the wars.
Pershore Foodbank's chest freezer failed at the start of the cold week of 11 January. Our quarterly grants window had closed on 31 December; the Bursar, against the rules, paid out the grant on the morning of 12 January. A new freezer was installed on the 14th. No one missed a meal.
The chart below shows how many small grants the Trust paid in each calendar year since 2019. The dip in 2020 reflects the suspension of the application window during the first months of the pandemic; 2022 was, on most measures, our largest year so far.
Aggregate grant value over the period: £294,840. Smallest grant in the period: £80 (a single emergency electricity top-up, paid in 2020). Largest single grant: £5,400 (a kitchen for a refuge in Newbury, 2022).
