Chaired by Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club Chief Executive Lisa Pursehouse, the Trent Bridge Community Trust delivers projects that have a profound and meaningful impact on communities across our county.

This impact is highlighted by statistics, but equally by the personal stories of young people who have prospered having been given the one thing they need, a sporting chance.

The Trust is the charitable arm of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club and our fortunes are intrinsically linked. All Trust staff are directly employed by the Club, allowing commercial partners and grant aiding bodies to have confidence that every penny they provide has an impact on frontline community initiatives.

“Our mission is to provide a sporting chance to more young people by ensuring that our schemes continue to prosper.”
Lisa Pursehouse – Chair, Trent Bridge Community Trust

The story of the Trent Bridge Community Trust

Since its formation in 2008, the Trust has invested over £2million into community projects over the past decade, and saved around £3million for local services.

Community Projects Manager Mark Clifford has been with the charity from the outset, as his first assignments took him into Cotgrave.

Longstanding issues with young people in the area had left residents concerned, community groups at their wits’ end, and teens cynical about broken promises.

But step-by-step, bonds were formed, trust was established, and progress was made.

“Sometimes with young people if you don’t deliver what you say you will, you’re just someone else who’s let them down, and they’ll have had that countless times,” he says.

“So we just started with basic things, saying ‘if you go to school for the whole of this week, on Friday night we’ll get a pizza in.’

“And from things like that, we had the hook. We could encourage them to start achieving in their lessons, or improve how they were behaving at home.

“We had to find a way to get their trust. Then, over a period of months, you can really start to work with them.”

That simple ethos – of establishing bonds with people, and showing faith in them – is something which has served the Trust well over the last decade.

And it is something that they have carried into all of their subsequent projects, from Healthy Hearts’ work to inspire schoolchildren to follow active lifestyles, to Positive Futures and the YouNG Project’s success in devising rewarding career pathways for young people.

More recently, Forget Me Notts has been established allow individuals with dementia to reminiscence and stay active. Notts in Mind, meanwhile, uses sport as a vehicle to build self-esteem and support networks for people of any age.

For Mark, each and every project brings its own personal satisfaction.

“Whether it’s a young kid coming to Trent Bridge for the first time and having that ‘wow’ moment, or it’s someone coming to Forget Me Notts saying ‘it’s the first time my husband’s smiled in a week’, so many parts of what we do are rewarding,” he says.

“The fact that we can see how we’re directly impacting people’s lives is what keeps us kicking on.”