One parish, properly known.
Our grants stay within Aubourn with Haddington and a handful of immediate neighbours. We know which lane the boiler is on, which fields flooded last winter, and which family lost a parent in spring.
A village endowment · Aubourn, Lincolnshire · Since 1964
We've sat at kitchen tables across Aubourn for sixty‑two years, listening first.
The Estate Charity of Sir Christopher Nevile is a small endowment that helps neighbours in the parish of Aubourn with Haddington when an unexpected month falls hard. Quiet grants, by post or in person, made by five trustees who live nearby.
What we believe
Four small principles, held lightly, for a long time.
We are a tiny endowment with one parish to look after. Everything we do follows from that.
We do not announce a household's hardship.
No press releases, no first names without permission, no photographs of beneficiaries. The trustees meet in person, decide quickly, and write a discreet cheque or hand over a voucher.
An endowment outlives a trustee.
The Nevile and Summers funds were left to the parish in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries respectively. Our job is to spend the income on the people the donors intended, and to keep the capital steady for the next generation.
If we cannot say it in a letter, we should not be doing it.
Every grant decision is written up in plain English in our minute book at Aubourn Village Hall. Anyone in the parish may ask to read it. We file accounts on time, every year, with the Charity Commission. We are listed under number 219964.
By the numbers, kept small
A modest charity, working at parish scale.
These are real figures drawn from our last filed return to the Charity Commission and our day-book at the village hall. We do not inflate them.
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Years of quiet local giving
Registered with the Charity Commission on 11 February 1964.
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Trustees, all parishioners
A working board of five neighbours, chaired by Jill Hughes.
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Households reached this year
Across Aubourn with Haddington and South Hykeham.
£0
Distributed in 2024–25
From the income of the Nevile and Summers funds.
The Winter Fund 2026
Twelve households, one cold January, and a kettle that needs to keep boiling.
The Winter Fund is the small pot from which we pay emergency fuel-top-ups, boiler call-outs and bedroom-heater grants for parishioners over sixty-five, or households with a child under five, between November and March. We are asking neighbours and old friends of Aubourn for help reaching twelve specific households this winter.
61% of the way there. A further £1,360 would close the gap and let us reach two more households the trustees know are waiting.
Our programmes
Four small purses, four very different needs.
We make grants to individuals only, drawn from the income of two endowed funds — the Nevile fund (seventeenth century) and the Summers fund (nineteenth century).
Programme · Kitchen-Table Grants
Kitchen-Table Grants
Same-week emergency grants of £40–£250 for households in the parish facing a sudden cost: a broken cooker, a vet bill, a funeral contribution, a bus fare to a hospital appointment in Lincoln.
Read about Kitchen-Table Grants
Programme · Summers Bursaries
The Summers Bursaries
Annual bursaries of £150–£400 from the Summers fund to young people from the parish starting apprenticeships, further education or a first set of work tools. Three to five awarded each autumn.
Read about the Summers Bursaries
Programme · Quiet Hour
Quiet Hour
Small monthly grants towards companionship for older parishioners who live alone — a befriender's mileage, a hairdresser's visit, a taxi to the surgery. Not a service we deliver: a small purse we open.
Read about Quiet Hour
Programme · Parish Wellbeing Fund
The Parish Wellbeing Fund
Grants of up to £500 towards mobility aids, hearing-loop hire, sensory-room equipment for the village hall, and small home adaptations for parishioners living with disability.
Read about the Parish Wellbeing Fund
Three stories from this year
Quiet, particular, told with permission.
We never publish names without consent and we never publish addresses. These three neighbours read and approved every word.
'I'd run out of options. They turned up the next morning with a plumber.'
Margaret, 78, lives alone in a cottage by the river. In January her boiler stopped on a Sunday afternoon. She telephoned her churchwarden, who telephoned us. By the Monday a Kitchen-Table Grant of £210 had paid for a same-day repair.
'I didn't have to ask twice,' she said when we visited the following week. 'They sat down, drank a cup of tea, and let me explain in my own time.'
Read the full story
'The Summers Bursary bought my first set of tools.'
Tom, 19, started his stonemason's apprenticeship at a yard near Lincoln last September. The Summers Bursary of £350 covered the chisels, mallet and steel rule his employer expected him to provide on day one.
'I'm the first one in my family to do this,' he said. 'It was a quiet leg-up — no fuss, no forms longer than a side of A4.'
Read the full story
'They paid for the rail, and they kept it private.'
Eleanor, 64, had a small stroke in February. The Parish Wellbeing Fund made a grant of £465 towards two grab-rails, a stair light, and a kettle tipper. The carpenter who fitted them lives three lanes away.
'I didn't want a fuss,' she said. 'I wanted a rail and a quiet morning. That's what they arranged.'
Read the full story
News & dispatches
A short reading shelf from the trustees.
Three pieces from our most recent quarterly dispatch — one on this year's Kitchen-Table Grants, one on the Summers Bursaries, and a small note on the spring floods.
Twenty-seven households reached this winter
What the Kitchen-Table Grants paid for between November and March — a candid breakdown, with permission.
What the Summers fund did this spring
Three apprentices and one mature student. A short account of the bursaries awarded at this year's spring meeting.
Quiet Hour: walking back from the floods
How a small companionship purse changed shape after the February high water along the Witham.