Twenty-seven households reached this winter, and a few things we got wrong.

Between the first of November 2025 and the last day of March 2026, the Estate Charity of Sir Christopher Nevile paid Kitchen-Table Grants to twenty-seven households across the parish of Aubourn with Haddington and the immediate neighbours. Total grant outlay across the four-and-a-half months: £812. Total administrative cost across the same period: £0. The trustees met four times, three at the village hall and one in John Mosedale's kitchen because the hall heating had given up.

This dispatch is an account of where that £812 went. We have written it the way the Chair would speak it on a Saturday morning at the village hall, plainly and with the names removed except where the household has asked to be named.

The shape of the winter

It was a cold winter, by Lincolnshire standards, but not an exceptional one. December was mild. January and the first ten days of February were hard. Snow lay on the lanes for three days from the eighth, and the temperature dropped to minus seven at the river-bank weather station on the eleventh. The two oldest boilers in the parish — both gravity-fed combis from the late eighties — gave out within thirty-six hours of each other. We paid for one to be repaired and one to be replaced. Of the £812, £374 (just under half) went on those two households alone.

That should not be the case. A charity of our size cannot be the local boiler-fund. We are working with the parish council and with a local installer — the same one we used in January — on a small pre-winter survey for households over the age of seventy. The idea is to identify boilers likely to fail before the cold snap, and to encourage households to apply early to the Government's Warm Home Discount and the energy company-led replacement schemes before turning to us.

What the rest of the £812 paid for

• £175 · contribution to a funeral cost for a Haddington household that had lost an elderly father in mid-December. The household had no immediate means of meeting the funeral director's deposit. We paid direct to the director.
• £160 · cooker replacement for a young family in Aubourn with two children under five. Their cooker failed two weeks before the school half-term. A neighbour wrote the request. We paid the appliance shop in Lincoln direct and the cooker was installed within four days.
• £90 · bus fares for a fortnight of hospital appointments at Lincoln County Hospital for a parishioner recovering from a small stroke. Paid as a single grant against a written estimate.
• £77 · veterinary bill for a working dog belonging to a single-parent household in Bassingham. The dog needed an emergency dental procedure. We paid the practice direct.
• £64 · fuel-meter top-ups for two households running on pre-payment electricity who had let themselves run down to single-figure balances by mid-January.
• £52 · school-uniform contribution for a Year 7 child whose family had moved into the parish in October and not been able to meet the cost of the new secondary's uniform.
• £45 · a contribution toward a school trip for an Aubourn Primary pupil whose family had asked to be considered.
• £40 · a glasses prescription for a parishioner waiting on an NHS appointment, who needed reading glasses to keep up with a part-time clerical job.

We do not believe that a charity of our size can fix the country. We believe it can pay a plumber on a Sunday afternoon for a neighbour who has run out of options. That is the work. From the Chair's notes to the March 2026 trustee meeting

A few things we got wrong

The trustees keep a 'what we got wrong' page at the back of the minute book. The page is in pencil. We have agreed it is the more important of the two pages.

This winter, the two clearest errors were these.

The first: we were slow to reach two households on the far edge of the parish, in Stapleford and Norton Disney. Both were known to a churchwarden at the daughter church but not to the rest of us. By the time we heard, the moment for the smaller grant had passed and one household had taken out a doorstep loan to cover the cost of a school-uniform replacement and a fuel top-up. We were able to make a grant to clear part of that loan, but at twice the cost we would have had to pay if we had been quicker. Lynne Rocks, who convenes Quiet Hour, is writing to every churchwarden in the deanery this June with a one-page card explaining what we can pay for and how to ask.

The second: our hardship referral form, which we send to head teachers at the start of every autumn, asks the wrong opening question. It asks 'is the family on benefits?' The honest answer for several of this winter's households was no, but they were nonetheless one shock away from real difficulty. We are rewriting the form for September 2026 to ask, more usefully, 'is this household one unexpected bill away from a difficult month?' That is the question that matches what we can actually pay for.

What we paid for that you will not see in the figures

Two trustees walked, between them, the equivalent of three full working days across the parish this winter — to visit, to listen, and to confirm that the grant had landed in the way we hoped. Those walks cost us nothing financially. They cost us in time, and they are the reason we feel we have done the work properly.

The kettle, by the way, is back on at every one of those twenty-seven kitchen tables. The work, this winter, was small and ordinary. We are grateful to every donor who made it possible — most of all to the small, recurring contribution from the Lincolnshire Community Foundation's local hardship pool, and to the seven old friends of Aubourn who set up standing orders for the first time after last spring's dispatch.

What to do if you can help

The Kitchen-Table Grants pot runs from November to the end of March. The pot is replenished each summer from the income of the Nevile fund and from small donations. The Winter Fund 2026 sits at £2,140 raised against a £3,500 target as of this week; a small gift to the Winter Fund closes the gap and lets us reach two more households the trustees already know are waiting.

If you would prefer to refer a household rather than donate, you can do that by writing to [email protected] or by speaking to a trustee at the next surgery on the first Saturday of the month at Aubourn Village Hall.