Bouttell Bequest

The Bouttell Bequest is a legacy-driven charitable trust with a mission to alleviate hardship and promote wellbeing for vulnerable individuals through targeted support to frontline charities in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Guided by values of practical compassion, prudent stewardship, and trustee discretion, it prioritizes tangible, local impact via sustainable investment income, believing enduring change arises from empowering established regional organizations delivering direct, person-centred services that address immediate needs like disability, illness, bereavement, and poverty with equity and community focus.

It funds interventions for disadvantaged children including bereavement counselling and support for child brain injury recovery, respite care and emotional wellbeing programs for young carers aged 5-19 facing family caring burdens, therapies, specialist equipment, and assistance dogs for adults and children with physical disabilities, visual impairments, multiple sclerosis, spina bifida, and learning disabilities, hospice care and palliative services for terminally ill patients and families, food insecurity relief through food banks and emergency provisions, community mental health day services and drop-in centres tackling isolation and hardship, Citizens Advice outreach for economic vulnerability, air ambulance emergency response for rural trauma cases, and inclusive community initiatives like arts, play schemes, and school-based projects fostering social inclusion and resilience. Supported models emphasize therapeutic activities, peer support groups, direct service delivery, equipment provision, and flexible core costs for grassroots providers addressing complex health needs, carer exhaustion, family crisis, and poverty.

Exclusions include large-scale infrastructure, national generalist organizations, and research-only projects, favouring specialist regional charities over broad national bodies. Distinctive for its hyper-local focus on Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire communities—rural villages, market towns, and urban fringes—it prioritizes beneficiaries like bereaved families, isolated disabled individuals, young carers, terminally ill residents, and low-income households in demonstrable crisis, valuing evidence-based, trauma-informed, community-led services from lived-experience-informed providers with proven frontline impact.