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BOAT – Blackfriars Overseas Aid Trust

Who We Are

Welcome to BOAT! Our charity (no. 288585) was founded in 1984 by a group from the 9.30 Family Mass at Blackfriars in Oxford, who wanted to reach out to communities across the world.

We have two charitable aims – the relief of poverty and the advancement of education, in Asia, Africa and South and Central America. In practice that translates into support for a range of projects (16 or 17 at any one time) mainly in the areas of health, community development or education.

What We Do

We want our funding really to “make a difference”, so we support small-scale or grass-roots projects with regular grants (currently around £2,500 a year). Occasionally we make a one-off grant (for things like water tanks or grinding mills). More often a project will be funded for three years and then considered for renewal on a rolling basis.

We always look for projects with some link to the congregation or the Dominican order. Though many have Catholic links, that is not a condition, and we don’t fund any form of evangelisation. We aim to help communities find long-term solutions to their needs, rather than short-term fixes, although, from time to time, we do give money to help with emergencies.

Some of Our Projects

Ethiopia – helping to provide education to the most disadvantaged in the village of Zizencho;
Grenada and Nicaragua – providing better nutrition for schoolchildren, to improve their educational attainment;
India – supporting a school for the children of rag pickers in a slum outside Delhi;
Myanmar – enabling communities to have access to clean drinking water through the provision of water tanks;
Peru – supporting a township project to reduce childhood malnutrition and domestic violence;
Philippines – assisting the indigenous Subaanen people to access health care and education;
Uganda – helping poor families in Kigumba become self-sufficient by setting up a poultry project.

Information about the different projects supported by BOAT is contained in our Annual Report.

In addition to our regular projects, we also support one or two particular projects through donations raised specifically during Lent. The BOAT Lenten Project is chosen by the 9.30 Family Mass congregation and is an opportunity to connect through fasting and prayer with communities across the world. In 2019, two projects were chosen: the first being one of the regular BOAT projects, in Andhra Pradesh, to help it cope with an extra influx of orphans; the other a new project, run by Benedictine Sisters in Manila, to enable the poorest to make a living.

You can find out more about BOAT from the overview on the Charity Commission website

BOAT LENTEN APPEAL 2022

The message that is coming through from many of BOAT’s project leaders is that the cost of living is going up dramatically. This, added to the disruption caused by COVID, means that schools and orphanages are having to budget ever more carefully – and feeding hungry children is an even greater challenge than usual.

How can we help?

This year, therefore, let’s make our small Lenten sacrifices make a difference in schools and orphanages supported by BOAT.

A 60p Cadbury’s Twirl equates to a 1kg bag of rice in the Philippines.
A £2.45 regular cappuccino equates to two 1kg bags of cassava in Sierra Leone.
And a £12 bottle of Malbec could buy you about 29 1kg bags of matoke fingers (cooking bananas) in Uganda!

Donations

As we are not all back in church yet, we will again be asking for contributions to be made direct to the BOAT bank account – though we will also be doing our traditional, in-person, collections at the end of Lent, after Mass.

Blackfriars Overseas Aid Trust,
Account Number 00087533,
Lloyds Bank plc, 1 High Street, Oxford OX1 4AA,
Sort Code 30-96-35.

Please put ‘Lenten Appeal 2022’ in the reference field.

It would also greatly help BOAT if you could complete a Gift Aid Declaration in respect of your donation, if you have not already done so. There is a downloadable Gift Aid Declaration at the bottom of this page. You can use the Gift Aid Declaration on its own, without having to set up a Standing Order. Completed Gift Aid Declaration forms can be sent:

by post to The Gift Aid Treasurer, Filomena Nave, Blackfriars Overseas Aid Trust (BOAT), c/o Porter’s Lodge, Blackfriars, St. Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LY; or
by email to the Gift Aid Treasurer, Filomena Nave, at the following email address: boatblackfriars@gmail.com.

What Makes Us Special

In 2019, we raised around £43,000 and gave grants of around £47,000 in total. We spent under £450 on administration costs (bank costs and producing our annual report).

We also have a personal link with all of our projects. Each of our Trustees keeps in touch throughout the year with one or two projects and gets to understand the challenges and achievements of the people we are working with. That’s often a very humbling experience and is a wonderful insight into the wider world for them and for the congregation as a whole.

How You Can Help

We are very lucky in the generosity of the congregation at Blackfriars and a wider group of supporters. We hold regular fundraising events (cafes, concerts, sales of recycled greetings cards and produce). But we rely on the income we get from our regular donors to be sure we can commit to longer term funding. If you would like to support our projects, please consider setting up a Standing Order in favour of BOAT.

With most banks and building societies, you can set up a Standing Order online or over the phone.
Alternatively, you can go into your bank to complete a Standing Order form. You’ll need the BOAT account number and sort code (as well as some personal identification).

Beneficiary Name: Blackfriars Overseas Aid Trust
Beneficiary Account Number: 00087533
Beneficiary Sort Code: 30-96-35
Beneficiary’s Bank: Lloyds Bank plc, 1 High Street, Oxford OX1 4AA.

Standing Order forms available to download below.

B.O.A.T. Privacy Notice – May 2018

Please see below for an explanation of why and how we use your data, and your rights in respect of that data.

In line with the transparency and information objectives of the General Data Protection Regulation, also known as the GDPR, BOAT, as a data controller, wishes to provide supporters with the following information:

Personal data we may hold

The personal data we may hold includes your name and address, your telephone and email contact details, and your bank account details. We only collect data directly from you, often in connection with a Gift Aid declaration.

Purposes of Processing

We hold your data for our legitimate interests of keeping you informed about BOAT’s activities, maintaining our accounting and tax records and promoting our general charitable purposes.

Recipients

We do not share your personal data with third parties other than our professional advisors, as necessary, and with HMRC if you have completed a Gift Aid declaration.

Retention Period

As many of our supporters have completed Gift Aid declarations, the personal data we hold is part of our tax records. In line with our tax record- keeping obligations, we generally hold your personal data for a period of 7 years after your last contact with us.

Data Subject Rights

Under the GDPR, you may be entitled to obtain information on the processing of your personal data, to object to the processing of your personal data, to make use of your right to data portability and to have your personal data rectified or deleted or its processing restricted. You are also entitled to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority, which is generally the supervisory authority where you work and/or are resident.

If you have given us consent for the processing of your personal data, you are entitled to revoke such consent at any time. Such revocation will not affect our continued processing of this personal data if we are entitled to continue doing so for a lawful purpose under the GDPR. For example, we may determine that we need to maintain your personal data for our legitimate purpose of maintaining accurate Gift Aid records.

Contact

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the processing of your personal data or the terms of this Notice or want to exercise your rights as outlined above, you should contact John Thanassoulis or Filomena Nave at the following address: Blackfriars Overseas Aid Trust, c/o Blackfriars Priory, 64 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LY.