How a county charity beat a £billion business to double in size

An chat with the in-coming CEO of The Nelson Trust in its 40th year has revealed not just her journey, but the charity’s life-saving work, an incredible contract win - and a familiar face as catalyst.

Dear reader,

We hope you’ve had a great week.

We’re a bit late to publish this Friday edition. Too many interviews with too many interesting people today pushed everything back! So please accept out apologies.

Today’s main story below focuses in on a story many know already, that The Nelson Trust celebrates 40 years this year. What many don’t know is the story of how it beat off a major billion pound turnover business to double in size almost overnight.

It’s story that came to light when we were lucky enough to interview the in-coming chief executive officer of the Stroud-based charity, learn more about the incredible work it does, and how it manages to punch above its weight as an effective force for change.

We also asked a national organisation involved in the same work - delivering support and hope to those in the most desperate of circumstances - what makes the Trust special and why it is proud to partner with it.

It is life-changing, life-saving stuff that sends positive ripples through the lives of many. And it’s all the result of an organisation born and bred here in Gloucestershire.

Oh, and we were delighted to say that as we peeled back the layers of the story we discovered at its heart was also a very close friend of The Raikes Journal. You’ll have to read on to find out who.

It’s all inspirational stuff, and we hope a positive one to provide you with some food for thought this weekend.

And speaking of the weekend, have a good one.

Remember, for every person you refer to The Raikes Journal’s email service you get points towards a free membership allowing you to see beyond our paywalls. Please do sign up (free or otherwise), send the referral link to a friend or colleague, and help us grow.

Andrew Merrell (editor).

If you have a story, an issue, a news item, a charity or an interview you want us to write about or investigate, challenge the powers that be on, then please email me: andrew.merrell@raikesjournal.co.uk.

NB: We believe Raikes now publishes probably the best-read business-related email ‘newsletter’, pound for pound, in Gloucestershire. Readership is growing and 2025 looks good!

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Your briefing notes…

📢 Back when I first relaunched The Raikes Journal I had the pleasure of speaking to Jane Roberts, a woman tirelessly devoted to raising awareness and helping put into place support for people with ADHD and their families. The heartbreaking story she told me, which became the backbone of the article, was about her son, his struggles as a result of the condition, and how he came to end his own life. She was prepared to retell it to publicise her bid to launch what is called the Gloucestershire Youth Neurodiversity Project, being run by Gloucestershire Community Foundation. It’s a ground-breaking project that she hopes will lead to the county becoming the best place in the country to live if you have ADHD. She has self-funded much of the work and is now looking for organisations to deliver a pilot project for the first year. She is incredible. You can find out more here. And read our big interview from early 2024 here.

🏆 Sophie McCall, another of the very early interviewees for The Raikes Journal when it relaunched back in 2024, had reason to celebrate this week. She’s been shortlisted in this year’s Security Excellence Awards, staged by The Channel Company. McCall, who founded the Security Queens blog and works for the a global cyber security company NCC Group, is shortlisted in the Security Rising Star category. Her NCC Group colleague, Sian John, is shortlisted in the Security Woman of the Year award and the firm’s Group Project Clover (TikTok) team is shortlisted for the Security Team of the Year award. You can read our interview with Sophie McCall here.

😕 On Monday we took a look at Gloucester City Homes decision to point the finger of blame at Gloucester City Council as pressure mounted over whether it would get its regeneration plans for Podsmead, an area just South of the city centre, to planning in time to capitalise on £20 million of funding. As we said, there was more to the story than met the eye. Something was not right. The just a couple of days later GCH was retracting a letter it sent out to residents in Kingsholm that appeared to suggest they might be liable to service charges related to the maintenance of nearby communal land that had not previously been charged - even though many were not actually GCH customers. Confusion reigned, the leader of the city council - already a little perturbed as a result of the previous week's accusations -gladly got involved, as did the city’s MP, Alex McIntyre. The letter was withdrawn. No one remains any the wiser.

💷 On Monday we also named the incoming chief executive officer of Gloucestershire County Council as Jo Walker. Walker will move from her current post as leader of North Somerset County Council in May. She’s lived in Gloucestershire for 36 years. What’s emerged since, courtesy of the BBC local government report Carmelo Garcia, is how much she will be paid - £189,000! If it needed anymore dressing up to catch your eye Garcia points out that is £17,000 more than the Prime Minister Keir Starmer gets paid and eight times more than the lowest paid worker at the local authority. Her salary is apparently in the range advertised for the role and benchmarked against other comparator councils. So there you go.

💷 That residents across Gloucestershire would be facing higher council tax bills became apparent this week. Without confusing you too much, bills are going up by an estimated 2.99 per cent for residents in Stroud District Council, more than five per cent for those in Wotton-under-Edge, by an estimated £6.15 for those in the Forest of Dean to £211.95 (for a Band D property), with Gloucestershire County Council increasing its proportion of everyone's overall bill by 4.99 per cent to £1,679.65.

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Sporting and other highlights this weekend…

Friday:

🎶💃🏽🕺🏾 A hidden festival - right under your very noses! Cotswold Water Park Hotel is staging a jazz, funk and soul weekender from tonight. Expect to party, in some style, with more than 600 others!

🧀🍷 There’s cheese and wine tasting from 6pm at The Cheeseworks, 5 Regent Street, Cheltenham.

Saturday:

⚽ Gloucester City AFC play Pool Town FC at away at 3pm.

⚽ Forest Green Rovers FC play Woking FC at home at 3pm.

⚽ Cheltenham Town play Newport County away at 3pm.

Sunday:

🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️🕊️ Tewkesbury Abbey will continue to stage its Peace Doves art installation, created by renowned sculptor Peter Walker. It runs until 27 February and featured 8,000 paper doves adorned with messages of peace from the community.

📷🖼️Gloucester Cathedral continues to celebrate the work of photography until Thursday 27 February during Cathedral opening hours.

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* The Raikes Journal is a community interest company. Everything you read by us is made possible by our incredible Founding Partners: QuoLux, Willans LLP, Gloucestershire College, Merrell People and Randall & Payne, our sponsors Hartpury University and Hartpury College, our Founding Members and wonderful paying subscribers.

If you subscribe and invite friends to The Raike Journal you will earn rewards towards complimentary membership (three referrals will get you one month, 10 will get you three months and 25 will win you six months).

If you upgrade to paid you’ll be part of this CIC too. We are dedicated to delivering quality journalism for Gloucestershire, to championing the county, in particular its businesses, charities, education and training providers, and to helping create an even stronger community. If you upgrade to paid you will be able to see past the paywalls often put on our second and third email editions of the week, that lock all our archive after two weeks and lock our rolling Top 100 Businesses in Gloucestershire series. You will be able to comment on our stories too. You’ll be helping make this CIC sustainable to deliver more original articles on our county.

You can sign up to receive your two extra editions a week and see past all our paywalls for just £2.30 a week - or £1.80 a week if two or more people sign up at once. Or go all in and become one of our Founding Partners or Founding Members!

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How a Gloucestershire charity beat a £billion business to double in size

An interview with the in-coming CEO of The Nelson Trust in its 40^th year has revealed not just her own journey, but the charity’s life-saving work, an incredible contract win - and a familiar face as catalyst.

By Andrew Merrell.

This is a significant year for The Nelson Trust, the Gloucestershire-headquartered charity that supports people with dependency issues and more – much more. It celebrates its 40^th year.

It’s been an astonishing journey that began in a converted Five Valleys pub (hence the name) and today is an operation dedicated to offering ‘holistic, trauma-informed and gender specific support’ to thousands of individuals annually across the South West and Wales.

That support is delivered via four single-gendered residential treatment centres for abstinence-based recovery, three more housing units for those leaving treatment and five community projects as part of its Hub enterprises.

These include the Hub Academy in Stroud and The Sober Parrot cafe in Cheltenham, with all of them offering training and work experience for what the Trust calls the recovery community to help build lifelong skills and return successfully to society.

In 2010, after years of paving the way for gender responsive support throughout the UK, the Trust also opened its first women’s centre in Gloucester, providing holistic support to women leaving prison, and women in the community on probation orders, as an alternative to custody.

And that’s still only part of what it does - its work now also outside Gloucestershire, a sign not just of the recognition of its success, but the ambition of its leadership team.

The Raikes Journal was lucky enough to speak to its incoming chief executive officer, Christina Line, who helped us understand how the charity has developed, the recognition it now gets and partnerships that make it all possible.

And through talking to others too it led us to understand how that success is being driven by a focus on staff development, and how it is using a Gloucestershire business to achieve that - one we are also very familiar with here at Raikes.

Plus, we got the inside track on how that partnership delivered a knockout blow to one of the UK’s biggest firms in a truly David v Goliath-like contract battle.

A contract that jet-propelled the Trust’s growth! We’ll get into all that and more below