"I'd run out of options on a Sunday afternoon. They turned up the next morning with a plumber. The boiler was fixed by tea-time and they wouldn't let me thank them, except by promising to come to the harvest tea."
In their own words
Four neighbours, four small grants, four very different sentences.
Every quotation below is published with explicit written consent. The trustees met each contributor at their own kitchen table and read the words back before printing.
A note on consent
We never publish a beneficiary's first name without an explicit, written 'yes, you may publish this'. In practice, we go further than that: we read the proposed paragraph back, in person or by post, and we adjust it until the household is content with every clause. Beneficiaries who would prefer not to be named at all are simply not named; we do not refer to them on this site even pseudonymously.
The four testimonies above were given between January and March 2026 and reviewed in writing in April. They will be retired from this page in May 2027 unless renewed. We do not 'rotate' testimonies indefinitely.
How we collect them
We do not run a testimonial collection campaign. Instead, after a grant has been paid and the work has been done, a trustee visits the household for a cup of tea, asks how the grant landed, and — only if it feels right — asks whether the household might be willing to share a sentence or two with old friends of Aubourn. If the answer is no, we never ask twice.
Old friends of Aubourn make the work possible.
A small monthly standing order is the easiest way to keep the Kitchen-Table Grants pot full all year.