Our mission is to remove the practical, social and ecological obstacles that prevent people across the British Isles — and the landscapes that hold them — from flourishing in the place they call home. We do this by listening, by funding what works, and by being patient enough to see slow change through.
We learned each of these the slow way. Together they are how we decide what to fund, what to refuse, and where to invest our limited time.
Value 01
Every new programme begins with at least 60 conversations — with residents, frontline workers, local councillors, faith leaders. Only then do we write a brief.
Value 02
Eight in ten of our trustees, and six in ten of our staff, live in the communities we serve. Proximity is our principal safeguard against irrelevance.
Value 03
Our grants are unrestricted by default, often for three to five years. We do not pretend to know a community better than the people who live in it.
Value 04
We publish our successes and our failures in equal weight, including the year we pulled out of a programme we'd run for nineteen years. Trust grows in the light.
In every new place we work, we spend twelve months simply being present — at school gates, in churchyards, on the towpath — before we write a single grant.
Every programme is shaped by a panel of residents and frontline workers. They agree the outcomes, the metrics and the redlines before any money moves.
Our default grant is three years, unrestricted, with annual conversations rather than annual reports. Stability beats supervision.
When local infrastructure can carry the work, we step back — sometimes after twenty years. The point was never the Trust. It was the place.
"The hardest discipline in charitable work is patience — to fund the slow, undramatic, deeply local change that the news does not cover. We have found that almost everything important falls into that category."
Marcus Whitford · Chief Executive
Our headquarters remain in Bath, where we were founded. Our programmes now operate across Somerset, Wiltshire, Bristol, Gloucestershire, Dorset, Hampshire and parts of South Wales, with the Neighbour Fund extending into a further nine local authority areas.
Whether for a Sunday morning or a lifetime, the Avon Trust is built from the time and care of ordinary people.
