Grants to charities
Cranfield Trust supports mental health charity
Duncan Maw (Durham Freemasons), Shauna Nixon (BSB), Christine Thomas, CEO, Building Self Belief Claudia Venosa-Hepworth (Cranfield Trust), Paul Quinn (Durham Freemasons), Ella Ashburn (BSB), Peter Thomas (BSB)
A Durham-based charity, which supports thousands of young people with their mental health and wellbeing, has benefitted from essential business strategy support through our unique partnership with the Cranfield Trust, helping the charity to be more sustainable in the future.
Building Self Belief aims to build stronger communities by building self-belief in vulnerable young people. The charity runs programmes that improve self-confidence, self-esteem and enhance the social skills of young people in deprived areas across the North East. Through its work it has significantly improved the mental health, self-esteem and life chances of thousands of local vulnerable young people. The charity sought support to develop a new business plan and expand the services it could offer.
The charity was matched with a local Cranfield Trust volunteer consultant and mentor with a broad experience in business planning and strategic business management. The free consultancy support has provided Building Self Belief with a clear plan for the future, setting out a roadmap of the goals they want to achieve and how they will achieve them. This will assist the charity in generating more income, to expand their staff team and as a result, the services they can offer.
Local Freemasons, Paul Quinn and Duncan Maw have visited Building Self Belief to present them with a certificate to celebrate the partnership and the expertise and support it has provided to help the charity and ultimately the young people it supports.
Building Self Belief is an excellent charity that does hugely important work helping young people with their mental health and thanks to the Cranfield Trust they’ve a clear plan for the future that will help them to do their work more effectively. The partnership between the Freemasons and the Trust has made a great charity even better.
We are giving £228,000 to Cranfield Trust to provide critical management support to 60 local welfare charities and organisations across the country over the next two years. Support includes free and tailored consultancy and individual mentoring, as well as supporting thousands more through learning activities and resources.
I’ve been very impressed with our volunteer and his support of us as a charity. I do feel we have made a great deal of progress, having had his feedback and support in the process. I would like to thank our volunteer for sharing his expertise with us and Cranfield Trust and Durham Freemasons for providing this support that’s given us a clear plan for the future and practical steps to introduce new services and increase our income.
We’re extremely grateful to Durham Freemasons for helping us to support charities like Building Self Belief, which are providing essential social welfare services to the local people and communities who need them at this most challenging time. This generous grant will enable the Cranfield Trust to link our highly skilled volunteers with frontline welfare charities across the country to provide tailored consultancy and mentoring services, that help develop strong, effective and resilient charities.
