A long refectory table laid simply for many guests — bread, water jugs, soup tureens, white linen, candles in glass.
Programmes & initiatives

Six small works, six steady hands.

All our work flows from the Trust's three Articles — prayer, learning, mercy — and from the way of life held by the small Benedictine community in our keeping. These six are how we mean those purposes in 2026.

I. Hospitality · since 2002, endowed 2022

The Pershore Hospitality Fellowship

The Fellowship pays the full cost — bed, board, spiritual direction — of a 2- to 5-night retreat at Sarum College for guests who would otherwise be priced out: carers between hospital admissions, ordinands without a stipend, hospice chaplains on the edge of burnout, and, since 2022, refugees in their first year of resettlement in the South of England.

The fellowship was, for two decades, kept as an ad hoc fund out of the bursar's discretionary cheque book. In 2022 it was formally endowed from the legacy of Dr Eileen Crowe, a long-time oblate, who left £820,000 for this purpose alone. We awarded 312 fellowship retreats in 2025, ranging from two-night silent retreats to fortnight-long convalescent stays.

312 guests, 2025 £820,000 Crowe endowment 2–14 nights typical Apply via the Hospitality Master
A simple guest room at Sarum College with a wooden bed, an open Psalter, a chair by a window onto the Close.
II. Religious learning · since 1972

The Dom Gregory Dix Liturgical Studies Programme

Seven postgraduate scholarships each year at Sarum College in memory of the Prior of Nashdom whose 1945 work The Shape of the Liturgy remains a touchstone of Anglican worship. Each scholar receives £6,800 toward fees, full board for the academic year, and access to the Trust's library of 14,800 volumes and the Nashdom manuscript archive.

We are not denominational about it. Six of the last seven Dix scholars have been Anglicans, but past cohorts have included a Reformed Jewish liturgist from Sheffield, a Coptic Orthodox doctoral student from Cambridge, and an atheist musicologist working on plainchant notation. The Trust requires only that scholars cite the programme in their work and offer a single seminar to the community before they leave.

7 scholars / year £6,800 per fellowship Sept–June academic year Apply by 15 February
Pages of a hand-bound liturgical study volume open on a long oak desk in the library, annotations in pencil in the margins.
III. Befriending · since 2009

Sunday Doors Befriending

The most outward-facing of the Trust's works. Trained volunteers — currently 184 of them — visit 6,240 older neighbours across forty-two villages and small towns between Salisbury and Pershore. The visits are weekly, usually one hour, and last on average 4.2 years. The longest pairing in the scheme began in November 2009 and is still going.

The programme was founded by Br. Crispin and a Salisbury GP, Dr Cassia Frith, after a 2008 mortality study in the Salisbury district showed that socially isolated over-75s were twice as likely to die in the winter following bereavement. It is not a chaplaincy scheme; volunteers are not asked to pray, witness, or hand out leaflets. They are asked to come on a Wednesday, to listen, and to come back the next Wednesday.

The Trust funds the scheme's coordinator (one full-time post), volunteer training (an eight-hour course required of every befriender), DBS checks, and a small mileage allowance for rural volunteers. The 2024 total cost of the programme was £46,000.

6,240 older neighbours 184 trained volunteers 42 villages & towns 4.2 years average pairing
A woman in her seventies sits at her kitchen table with a younger volunteer, both holding mugs of tea, a paper of vegetables between them.
IV. Sacred music · since 1981

The Anselm Bursary for Sacred Music

Named for Dom Anselm Hughes (1889–1974), the Nashdom director of music who edited the great twentieth-century revivals of plainchant in English. Four singer-bursaries and one organist-bursary are awarded each year, at £3,400 per singer and £6,000 per organist, to support study at Sarum College or the Diocesan Choir School in Salisbury.

Bursars are required to sing or play at the Trust's Compline at Eight on at least eight Tuesdays in their bursary year, and at the patronal services of the community — Saint Benedict on 11 July, All Saints, and Christmas.

4 singers + 1 organist £3,400 / £6,000 1 year duration Apply by 30 April
A young chorister in cassock arranges plainchant books on a music stand in the chapel; afternoon light through a stained glass window catches the page.
V. Relief grants · since 2018

Cloister & Common Bread Grants Fund

Small unrestricted grants — average £1,580 — to small charities (under £400,000 annual income) working with the very poor in the four counties of our pilgrim history: Worcestershire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire. Forty-seven such grants in 2024, totalling £74,200.

Applications are reviewed by the Bursar and the Trust's grants committee (four oblates with relevant frontline experience) on a rolling quarterly basis. We do not require a formal application form. A two-page letter, on whatever paper you have, telling us who you are and what £1,500 would let you do, is what we ask. The largest gift in 2024 (£4,200) went to Pershore Foodbank; the smallest (£180) to a parish lunch club in Speen that had simply run out of jam.

We do not fund: salaries, capital projects over £8,000, or work outside the four counties. We do fund: heating in winter, a new washing machine, a fortnight's groceries, a deposit on a flat for someone leaving a refuge, two new freezers, the printing of a small leaflet, and, four times, the renewal of a vital insurance policy.

£74,200 in 2024 47 grants £180–£4,200 range 4 quarterly windows
Brown paper bags of bread and tinned goods lined up on a parish hall table, ready for distribution at a small foodbank.
VI. Public prayer · since 1989

Compline at Eight

Every Tuesday at 20:00 — through Lent, through August, through Christmas week, through the bitterest February nights — the brothers and around twenty visitors gather in the chapel for sung Compline. The service lasts about twenty-eight minutes. It is sung from a printed sheet so that newcomers can join. There is no homily. There is no collection. There is one beeswax candle.

Compline at Eight is not a programme that costs much: a few pounds of candles a year, the printing of about 1,800 service sheets, and the time of the brothers. It is, by some quiet measure, the most consistent thing we do. It has not been cancelled since 26 January 1991, when a burst pipe in the Elmore chapel made the building briefly unusable. The Trust includes Compline as a Programme of its own because — for many of those who come — it is the only point of contact with anything called "monastic" in their whole lives.

Tuesdays 20:00 ~20 visitors typical 28 minutes long Open to all · no booking
Candles burning on the floor of a small chapel during evening prayer, the cloister window pale violet behind.
If you are a small charity

Apply for a Cloister & Common Bread grant.

A two-page letter, no formal form. We respond to every applicant within six weeks of the closing date. The four windows for 2026 close on 31 January, 30 April, 31 July, and 31 October.

Grant guidance & sample letter Ask the Bursar a question