Newsletter June 2025

Dear Supporter,

It is my turn to write this issue of our Newsletter. I have been a member of the Board of Trustees in the lead up to making the painful decision to go into administration, but also the privilege of coming out with sufficient funding to enable us to change our focus from managing buildings and lovely grounds to giving grants to Christian charities in Kent and East Sussex. I believe that the Lord’s hand has been over the charity throughout that time, and we are now able to reach out to many more people who need the love of Godin their present situations and Christian healing in many ways. This is reflected in the range of grants that we give from community gardens to therapy for children and young people.

At our last Board of Trustees’ meeting in March 2025 we awarded six grants. These included two community garden projects – one at St Augustine’s Church, Gillingham, and the other in land adjacent to St Peter’s Church, Greenhill, near Herne Bay – Growing Hope, a charity with a clear Christian ethos, to run a clinic run by therapists for children and young people and their parents to address mental health issues and based at St Luke’s Church, Maidstone, and a Parish Nursing post based at Gillingham Baptist Church.

As a charity, we are always grateful to those supporters who remember the Dorothy Kerin Trust in their wills. Often, we do not know what prompted them to leave a legacy or, indeed, anything about them. The executor is frequently a solicitor with no personal knowledge about them. However, recently the charity received a legacy from the late Reverend Audrey Shilling who, it turned out, had stayed at Burrswood in 2008. One of her executors, Christopher Berry, shared a paper that Audrey had written about her Christian life. She was a committed Christian all her life and, through her early experience of working as a housing manager for five years, wanted to do more to improve the lives of people in cities and bring the Gospel of Christ to them. In response to Christ’s call, she was ‘determined to seek to serve Him through evangelism’. She joined the Church Army and served in several locations before she retired at the age of 60. She then became involved in her local church and community, whilst campaigning for the ordination of women to the priesthood in the Church of England. At the age of 68 she was the oldest of 32 women to be ordained a priest in the Diocese of Rochester in 1994. She then helped in her Parish church with services, funerals and weddings and also in a range of other initiatives from volunteers to support asylum seekers in prison to chaplaincy in the local women’s prison. Clearly a woman who would have got on well with Dorothy Kerin herself, as they both sought to do the Lord’s will in so many ways.

Annual Gathering 2025

This will be held on Saturday 11th October 2025 from 2-4pm in Chatham (venue TBC.)

There will be a service of thanksgiving led by the Reverend Luke Bacon, followed by presentations from three charities who have received grants, the launch of our new website and time to reflect and discuss the charity’s activities. Tea will be served. We do hope that you can join us.

May God bless you.

Sarah Davies

Deputy Chairman on behalf of the Dorothy Kerin Trustees