01 · Discreet
Money quietly.
Our grants are made without ceremony. We ask only what we must ask, we do not photograph people receiving help, and we never name a household in print without their explicit blessing.
A parish trust · Nottinghamshire · since 1964
For sixty years we've stayed close to home — small grants, kitchen-table visits, and a parish that knows us by name.
Arnold Relief in Need is a small, deliberately local charity rooted in the ancient parish of Arnold, on the northern edge of Nottingham. We make modest hardship grants, run a quiet befriending round, and stand alongside neighbours who would rather not ask twice. We answer to nine trustees and to the parish itself.
62
years in the parish
9
working trustees
0
paid staff
Quiet measure
312 small grants made in the past five years.
Median grant value: £85.
A standing rule
'No form is the form. Tell us in your own words.'
— From the trustees' note to caseworkers
0
Hardship grants · last 5 years
£0
Granted to neighbours · since 2020
0
Older neighbours visited monthly
0
Median time from ask to grant
What we hold to
A trust ought to be quiet, useful, and answerable to the street it lives on.
Arnold Relief in Need was built out of older parish doles, vestry funds and almsgiving going back well before the Victorian period. The 1964 registration brought several of those constituents under one umbrella, but the work itself — small, attentive, doorstep — did not change. It is, deliberately, still the same.
We are not a service provider. We are a trust that knows the names of the streets we serve and tries to be useful between the cracks of the larger systems.
02 · Parish-bound
Only Arnold.
Our governing document binds us to the ancient parish of Arnold — Daybrook, Killisick, Woodthorpe, Redhill, Bestwood Village, and the streets around St Mary's. We do not stray outside it, and we say so plainly when we cannot help.
03 · Volunteer-run
Nobody is paid.
Nine trustees and a small rota of befrienders do every piece of this work in evenings and at kitchen tables. The trust holds no premises, no staff, no overheads beyond a yearly insurance bill.
04 · Slow
Friendship over throughput.
We have always preferred to know one household well than to count a thousand we never met. Our average befriending partnership lasts 4.2 years.
Our six standing programmes
Six small commitments we keep, year after year, regardless of weather.
Befriending
Sunday Doors
A standing visit on Sunday afternoons to sixty-four older neighbours across the parish — a kettle on, the post read aloud, a small repair noted for the trustees.
Read more
Hardship grant
Winter Doorstep
A small, named fuel grant of £80 to £200 made between November and March to households flagged by parish workers, school welfare leads, or a neighbour who knows.
Read more
School-uniform grant
First Bell
An August grant of up to £120 per child for parish primaries and the two parish secondaries — shoes, a coat, a PE kit, and a clean start to the new term.
Read more
Christmas relief
Wassail Fund
A small hamper and a £40 grocer's voucher delivered in the week before Christmas to ninety households flagged by the parish workers and the food larder.
Read more
Partner grant
Parish Pantry
A quarterly grant to the food larder at St Paul's, Daybrook, and to the Arnot Hill community fridge — fresh produce, nappies, and the bills that keep the lights on.
Read more
Emergency repair
Quiet Repair
A discretionary fund covering an emergency boiler call-out, a replacement cooker, or a new fridge for a household where the alternative is doing without.
Read moreThis winter · Winter Doorstep 2026
Help us reach 180 households across Arnold before the cold sets in.
Our trustees have set a Winter Doorstep target of £14,400 — that is 180 households at an average grant of £80, delivered between the first frost and the spring thaw. Last year we reached 142 households. This year we would like to reach more.
Raised so far · £9,280
Target · £14,400
64% · 116 households covered to date.
Standing alongside
A small rota of volunteers keeps the trust on its feet.
We do not need an army. We need three or four people each season who can walk a round of doors, listen well, and report what they hear back to the trustees. If that sounds like you, please write.
Sunday · 2 hrs/fortnight
Sunday Doors befriender
Visit two older neighbours on a Sunday afternoon. Listen, look in on the post, note anything that wants mending.
Read roleNov–Mar · 4 hrs/week
Winter grants caseworker
Read the Winter Doorstep applications, ring the household for a kind word, recommend an amount to the trustees.
Read roleDecember · one weekend
Wassail driver
Drive a small route across the parish over the third weekend of December, dropping ninety hampers door to door.
Read roleWhat it has looked like, lately
Three small stories from the parish, told with permission.
Story · Killisick
'I had stopped opening the post. They came in and sat with it.'
Margaret, 78, on the Sunday Doors befriender who has visited her every other week for the last three years.
Read the story
Story · Daybrook
'New shoes that fit, on the first day, like the other lads.'
A First Bell grant of £120 in August 2025 covered shoes, a coat, and a PE kit for Thomas, 11, before the autumn term at Arnold Hill.
Read the story
Story · Woodthorpe
'A boiler that worked, that week, not in eight weeks.'
Sunita, 52, on the £420 Quiet Repair grant that paid an engineer to come the next morning after a December breakdown.
Read the storyGrants out · last eight years
Modest in absolute terms — and steady, the way a parish wants it.
These are the small hardship grants paid out across all six programmes in each financial year. The dip in 2020 was deliberate — that year we held funds for the worst of the pandemic winter — and the 2025 figure reflects a quieter year of trustee reserves consolidation. The 2026 trend is already running ahead.
Reserves cycle and an unusually quiet 2025 mean the official Charity Commission return for the year to June 2025 records only £37 of income against the constituent fund — the working capital sits in linked accounts. See our annual reports for the full picture.
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
In the parish diary
A few small gatherings we hold for the parish each year.
Sat
17
Oct · 26
Parish Supper at St Mary's
St Mary the Virgin · Church Lane · 18.30 to 21.00.
A long-table supper for one hundred parishioners — pay what you can, leave a coat at the door.
Sun
22
Nov · 26
Winter Doorstep launch tea
Arnot Hill House orangery · 14.00 to 16.30.
The trustees open the year's Winter Doorstep grant round with a small tea for parish workers.
Sat
19
Dec · 26
Wassail Fund delivery day
St Paul's Daybrook · 08.30 to 13.00.
Hampers packed, routes assigned, ninety doors knocked. Drivers and packers welcome.
Recent dispatches
Three pieces written from the parish, in the last few months.
· Letter from the chair
Sunday Doors at ten: what we have learned, and what we got wrong
Ten years of fortnightly visits across the parish, in our own words. A short reckoning from the trustees.
· Grants report
The winter we paid out 142 small fuel grants — and where they went
A short, plain map of every Winter Doorstep grant across the parish between November and the spring thaw.
· Partner news
A second plot at Bestwood: the parish pantry takes on a growing patch
A small grant of £1,200 to the Bestwood Village Allotment Society to take on a second plot for the parish food larder.
In their words
Six voices from across the ancient parish of Arnold.
Every quote here was given with consent and read back to the person who said it before we put it on the page.
I had stopped opening the post. They came in and sat with it. It is the smallest thing — and the largest thing, both.
The First Bell letter came in a plain envelope. No fanfare. Just £120 and a kind line at the bottom that said: 'we hope this helps Thomas to start the term as he wants to.'
A boiler that worked, that week, not in eight weeks. That is what it bought us, the Quiet Repair grant. I am still grateful for the speed of it.
They never made me say it twice. They never made me say it loudly. That mattered, I think more than the money did.
If I write to the trustees on a Tuesday afternoon, the household has heard back by Friday morning. That is rare in this work, and it is the whole point of a small parish trust.
It is the first organisation that gave me something without asking me to be grateful in the right way. They just said yes, and that was the end of it.
We work alongside
Our quarterly dispatch
Four short letters a year, from the parish to your inbox.
A trustee writes our dispatch in the first week of each quarter — what we granted, what we learned, where we got it wrong. No marketing, no urgency, no asks beyond the obvious one.
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