Every testimonial on this page is published with the written, revocable permission of the person concerned. Names are changed where the speaker asked for that; otherwise they are not.
I am eighty-three and I live on my own. The Trust calls me every Tuesday and Friday. For a year now. Some of the calls are five minutes long. One of them, after my brother died, was forty minutes. Neither of us said very much. It is enough that they kept calling.
The bursary from the Mobility & Equipment fund paid for my safety boots, my first month of bus tickets, and the basic toolkit my placement asked for. Without it I would have had to give up the apprenticeship after the second week. I am now in my second year. None of that happens without a quiet phone call to a charity I had never heard of.
My washing machine broke at the same week my husband went into hospital for a hip replacement. I rang on a Wednesday and on Friday morning a new machine was delivered. The Trust did not ask me to fill in a form. They did not ask me to evidence anything. They simply asked if I needed anything else.
My Tuesday morning visit to the Quiet Visits programme is the only place in the week I do not have to be brave. Eve never says very much. The kettle is always on. There is a sycamore-leaf print on the wall. I think I will miss it when I do not need to come any more — but I will be glad when that day is.
I have shopped at the Practical Recovery Aid programme on Saturday mornings for two years. The first time, I was very nervous. By the third visit, Daniel had remembered my name and the kind of bread my husband likes. It is not a foodbank. It is, simply, the friendliest shop in Eastham village.
In February the Trust paid £680 directly to a heating engineer to fix my boiler. They did not write to me about it afterwards. They did not ask me to thank them on the phone. The next time I saw Anita, she did not even refer to it. That is something quite uncommon in my experience of charities.
I have volunteered with the Trust since 2009. I have driven older neighbours to hospital, sat in housing tribunals, packed bags of vegetables and locked the village hall up after Christmas lunch. None of it has ever felt grand and none of it has ever felt wasted. It is, simply, the most useful Saturday morning of my week.
I had retired in 2022 and was, frankly, quietly going to pieces. The the Practical Recovery Aid programme's induction evening was the gentlest social environment I had encountered in twenty years. I am now on the Saturday rota and I think I have laughed more in the past nine months than in the previous five years.
I drive twice a week — Monday morning to Worcester Royal, Wednesday afternoon to Hereford County hospital. The Trust reimburses my mileage promptly, my car has clearly been at its happiest since I started volunteering, and I have learned more about my neighbourhood in eighteen months than I did in twenty-eight years of living here.
I am twenty-four and I was looking for something that did not feel like work to make me a better doctor. Quiet Visits has been more useful to my training than any module of medical school. The listening-skills training Eve gave us is, I suspect, the single most important thing I have learned in three years.
As a primary care nurse, I cannot give my patients a £140 heating grant on a Friday afternoon. The Trust can, and they do, without making people fill in anything humiliating. I refer to them roughly twice a fortnight.
The Trust knows our families. They know which uniform shop has a discount in September, which calculators the maths department needs, which apprenticeship workshops will actually take an interview. As a careers lead, I refer continually.
There are perhaps four or five places in the borough I will refer somebody to without hesitation. The Trust is one of them. The decision is consistently quick, the dignity consistently held, and the follow-up consistently kind.
