An anonymous donor established the Wakeham Trust in 1973.

It takes its name from Wakeham House where the Trust office is; the name has no particular significance.

The Trustees have a wide range of experience between them, but almost all have been involved in running community action projects.

The first Trustees were ex-volunteers with Community Service Volunteers.

We provide grants to help people rebuild their communities. We are particularly interested in neighbourhood projects, community arts projects, projects involving community service by young people, or projects set up by those who are socially excluded.

We also support innovative projects to promote excellence in teaching (at any level, from primary schools to universities), though we never support individuals.

We aim to refresh the parts that other funding sources can't reach, especially new ideas and unpopular causes.Because we don't appeal to the public for funds, we can take risks.

Because we are mostly run by volunteers, we can afford to make very small grants, without our funds being eaten up by administration costs.

We favour small projects - often, but not always, start-ups. We try to break the vicious circle whereby you have to be established to get funding from major charities, but you have to get funding to get established.

Recently, our objectives have become widely discussed under the heading 'rebuilding social capital' - and much of what we try to do is summed up in the literature on social capital, such as Robert Putnam's book 'Bowling Alone', and in some of the work being undertaken by the Social Exclusion Unit of the U.K. Cabinet Office. We also have quite similar objectives to the much larger Prince's Trust, so it can be worth while applying to them as well as to us. If you would like to find out more about these topics, you will find more useful links on our Links page.

Copyright ©The Wakeham Trust 2009