2025 Community Supporter and Volunteer Awards: The Winners

We are proud to announce the winners of this year’s Community Supporter and Volunteer Awards sponsored by Marsh Charitable Trust. In the run up to the awards many of our nominees shared their stories with us and with so many creative, persevering and caring volunteers it was incredibly difficult to choose only a handful of winners. That being said, our winners are definitely deserving of recognition, but all our volunteers deserve a huge ‘Thank you!’ for their amazing contributions. We are lucky to have you!

First up, we have artists Val Jones and Ray from St Martin’s Church, Exeter, who are the winners of our new CCT Creativity Award. They were brave enough to trial Exeter St. Martin’s as a gallery space, ran a pop-up art shop there which brought nearly 600 visitors to the church and created interpretation resources for CCT. Thank you, Val and Ray, for engaging visitors in creative ways!

The winners of the Marsh Award for Digital Initiative are The Friends of St Peters Wolfhampcote! Their strong digital presence has helped to raise the profile of the church, and they have recently recruited a social media volunteer and secured a new grant for a fundraising video. Thank you, Friends of St. Peter’s, for putting Wolfhampcote on the map!

The winner of the Marsh Award for Achieving Impact is Victoria Simkin from St John’s Chapel in Chichester! In early 2024, the Friends of St John’s Chapel faced possible dissolution, but Victoria helped to recruit 25 new event volunteers! She wouldn’t recommend letting your Friends group get to the brink of dissolution to anyone and says it wasn’t an easy process, but she also shows that there is room for giving historic churches a second chance. Thank you, Victoria!

As a delightful surprise, we had joint winners for the Marsh Fundraising Award this year: St Bartholomew’s at Lower Basildon and St Mary’s at North Huish are sharing the award. They both have worked miracles to help raise funds, and the churches have a brighter future because of it. Thanks, Lower Basildon for working hard to #Raisetheroof and North Huish for a truly electric achievement!

The Marsh Volunteer Team of the Year award is always hotly contested and this year the winners are the Friends of St Benedict’s in Paddlesworth. The team come primarily from St. Benedict’s ‘sister’ church at nearby Dode and have been kind to take St. Benedict’s under their wing as well. Since getting involved with St. Benedict’s, they have organised an annual events programme including community walks, concerts and historical talks. Thanks for giving St. Ben’s a future!

Lastly, we want to mention our Volunteers of the Year for our different regions! Congratulations to Brenda Owens at 1719 (Sunderland), Barry Wadeson in Northants and Tony & Lindsay Davies at Hartley Wintney. Brenda has been described as the heartbeat of 1719. She runs arts and crafts workshops that offer social benefits for participants and generate donations for the church and her warm, innovative and practical attitude makes Holy Trinity, Sunderland, a place that people want to visit! 

Barry is what we call an area volunteer and supports other volunteer groups around Northants, Bucks and Beds with expertise and kindness. He looks after 14 churches in total now, collecting visitor numbers and conducting visual inspections and we know that our regional colleagues are incredibly grateful for his support.

Tony and Lindsay are founder members of the Friends of St. Mary’s, Hartley Wintney, they have been instrumental in enabling St Mary's to be open to the public by organising the volunteer rota and being present on many Sunday afternoons, at all events held at the church and also being available when people wished to visit outside of normal opening hours. They are also digitising parish records and are working on getting St. Mary’s fit for the future with solar. Every community needs people like Tony and Lindsay!

Thank you all for your incredible support! 

This year's Community Supporter and Volunteer Awards were sponsored by Marsh Charitable Trust, which marks the fifteenth year of this collaboration between CCT and Marsh. The evening, which took place on zoom, was opened by our Chief Executive, Greg Pickup, followed by a welcome speech from our Trustee Inayat Omarji MBE. Our Director of Operations, Judith Patrick led through the evening, which was filled with live volunteer talks, as well as recorded volunteer stories and 'thank you' messages from trustees. The most joyful aspect of the evening though, was to hear the genuine emotion in the winners voices, when accepting their awards. Below, you can hear two of our 2024 Winners talk about what difference the Marsh awards money made for them and their churches...