The past year has been another busy one for the Gloucestershire Environmental Trust. We spent a record amount of money in grants – nearly three quarters of a million pounds. The scope of the 48 projects that we supported was as wide as ever: village halls, nature reserves, churches, sports pavilions, community facilities and much more besides, as this report shows. But in the space available here we can write up only a dozen schemes, which illustrate the range of work that we assisted last year in Gloucestershire. We were also able once more to spread our support across the county: all six districts have benefited to a varying degree.
In the course of the year we celebrated our tenth anniversary with a very enjoyable event in Highnam. We deliberately used the occasion to look forward rather than back, and encouraged new applications. I hope that we will be able to report on an even higher level of funding in next year’s report.
But it was also a year of setbacks and loss. Last summer, the floods hit our county badly – who can forget those dark skies and the incessant, almost frighteningly intense downpour of 20th July? Many places that are of concern to us were badly affected – historic churches, halls, nature reserves in the Severn Valley, and so on. We hope that we can play our part in putting right some of the damage that occurred and helping community groups recover from the financial and emotional trauma of the floods.
|
|
We suffered too a grievous personal loss when our Cory trustee, David Burton, died in November. He had been ill for a very short time and his death was a terrible blow to his family. As fellow trustees, we lost a valued colleague. At David’s funeral, I said that he really was the foundation of the Gloucestershire Environmental Trust. I recalled that at the 10th anniversary event, which David sadly had been too ill to attend, the trust had recorded the expenditure of £6 million on more than 400 projects – and that this success story probably owed more to David Burton than to any other single individual. It was a record of which he was rightly proud. It can be thought of as his lasting memorial, touching the lives of thousands of people in the county.
I want too to thank the other trustees, especially for their support during the difficult time of David’s illness. We have appointed Jim Chapman as Company Secretary, and Diana Organ and Paul Holliday have been a great help in looking after the interests of our staff. Jane Evans, the Trust Secretary, has, as always, been a huge help and we are all indebted to her. In the autumn, she was joined by Melanie Hambidge who has increased our capacity to handle an expanding work load.
Click here to download a PDF of the annual report.
|
|
