East Durham Community Development Trust Ltd

The Trust focuses its support on the needs of East Durham's former mining communities, with activity concentrated in the ex-Easington District of County Durham. Funded themes reflect local priorities, including poverty alleviation, mental and physical health, educational attainment, food insecurity, debt advice, social inclusion, community arts, volunteering, youth engagement, and crisis support. Supported work spans both immediate relief and preventive action: emergency food parcels, Men's Groups, befriending phone lines, volunteer training, and capacity building for community and third-sector groups. Financial literacy and employability skills are also supported, alongside a wider emphasis on enabling grassroots initiatives that build sustained wellbeing and resilience. The Trust funds urban and rural regeneration activity that helps local people to help themselves.

The Trust's funding is directed to East Durham-based community groups and grassroots organisations that can demonstrate local impact on deprivation. It favours small and medium-sized entities embedded in the local community, with no strict income thresholds. Priority beneficiaries include families in hardship, older people, young people, those with poor mental health, and individuals facing financial strain. Organisations working with these groups through volunteer-led or frontline services are likely to be a good fit. The Trust's remit is tightly bound to the ex-Easington District of County Durham, so applicants should be rooted in this area.

The Trust does not fund activity outside East Durham. Its focus is firmly on the former mining communities of the ex-Easington District of County Durham, so organisations delivering elsewhere in the UK, or even in other parts of County Durham, would not be eligible. There are no explicit restrictions on other types of work beyond this geographic boundary, but funding is concentrated on the community and grassroots causes described above.

The Trust works by invitation and through partnership rather than accepting unsolicited approaches. It operates as a flexible, responsive funder, with support levels shaped by the needs of each project and the local context. Alongside its grant-making, the Trust acts as a convener of local voluntary collaboration, blending funder and service-provider roles to co-produce solutions with residents and grassroots groups. This place-based approach aims to build sustained wellbeing and resilience across East Durham.