If you have skills in administration and/or finance, enjoy helping people, and want to help the amazing heritage of our historic churches too, this could be for you. The Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust is looking for a new Grants Secretary: read on to find out more.

We need someone with administrative experience to take on this important role. You will be in sympathy with the ambitions of applicants and the problems they face, and may have some experience of project work or applying for grants yourself.

Responsibilities include:-

Maintain a record of initial enquiries regarding grants. These may translate to only one or two formal applications each month, max 30 per annum. Correspondence may be by post or – increasingly – by email.

Prepare a summary Report and present it to the Executive Committee’s 6 meetings. Meetings are held every other month, usually in Ely.

Advise applicants of Committee decisions in writing using the existing pro-forma documents (currently in MS Word). In addition, one or two recommendations are made each year to the National Churches Trust for Partnership Grants, using NCT’s own web-based procedure.

Receive requests for loan drawdowns and recommend them to the Treasurer, who will monitor the subsequent repayments. These are usually over 4 years with equal annual instalments, although occasionally bridging loans are offered.

Receive and process claims from churches for the release of grant monies and advise the Treasurer accordingly.

Using your records of the above, prepare a short narrative for inclusion in our Spring and Autumn Newsletters.

These duties are estimated to take 2-3 hours of home-working each week on average, plus attendance at meetings.

The Trust runs an Annual Conference, and 4 church tours each summer. The Grants Secretary is warmly invited to attend but is not part of the job description.

To find out more please contact the Chair of the Trust, Bishop David Thomson (bishop.huntingdon@elydiocese.org) or the present Grants Secretary Andy Clarke (andy.clarke@tesco.net).