Our mission
A warm room, an unlocked door, and a kind face in the kitchen on Sunday afternoons.
We are a charity of small means and small ambitions. Our mission has not changed materially since 1632: to keep four cottages habitable, and to keep older neighbours within reach of the town that has always been their own.
Values
Five things we keep returning to.
Proximity
We do one thing, in one place, for people we know by name. We do not have a head office in another city.
Slowness
An almshouse is a multi-generational promise. Repairs take longer than they would in a commercial property, but they last as long as the building.
Quietness
We do not photograph residents without permission, we do not name them in fundraising letters, and we do not put their stories online unless they have read the piece first.
Honesty
Our accounts are independently examined and published in full. We say what we do and what we do not do; we say what we have got wrong; we say no when we cannot help.
Loyalty
A resident’s tenancy is for life, not for a fixed term. We do not move people on when they become more expensive to support.
Hospitality
There is always a kettle on, a chair at the kitchen table, and a welcome at the gate. This is not a brochure line; it is a rota.
Theory of change
From a warm room to a quieter old age.
We are not equipped to make a sweeping claim about reducing rural loneliness across West Sussex. What we can say is what happens, in sequence, when our work goes well.
Input
What we provide
A four-bedroom almshouse, a kitchen garden, a roster of weekly companion visitors, a small welfare fund of about £6,000 a year.
Outputs
What happens
Four residents are housed for as long as they wish. About 30 visits a week are made across the four parishes. About 90 small grants a year are paid.
Outcome
What changes
Older neighbours stay in Midhurst longer, on terms that do not strip them of their dignity or their familiar streets. The town keeps its older voices.
A note on what we have not solved
One thing we have not yet got right.
In 2019 we accepted a generous offer from a national charity to digitise our Sunday Doors visiting log. The aim was sensible: to replace the duplicate paper rota that had been kept since 1997 with a shared online schedule that volunteers could update from a phone. We piloted it for three months in Cocking.
It did not work. Two of our older volunteers stopped volunteering rather than learn the new system. A third lost a visit from her log when the app updated overnight. We retired the pilot in early 2020 and went back to the paper rota, which still hangs on a nail inside the porch of St Mary Magdalene and St Denys.
We tell this story for two reasons. First, because the people we serve are not always best served by the tools that work elsewhere. Second, because we want to be honest with donors about the limits of what we know how to do. We are a six-trustee charity in a market town; we will make mistakes, and we would rather tell you about them than not.
Where we work
Four parishes, two market towns, one short walk between them.
Our area of benefit, as defined in the 1963 Scheme, is “the ancient parish of Midhurst and such adjoining parishes as the Trustees from time to time determine”. In practice this has meant Midhurst itself, Easebourne, Cocking, Stedham, Trotton, Iping and Bepton. We do not work beyond the boundaries of the South Downs National Park except by formal exception.
Residents must have lived in West Sussex for at least ten years to be eligible for an almshouse. Grant recipients from the Wassail Fund must live within the area of benefit. Volunteers are welcome from anywhere they can comfortably travel from.