Written for anyone weighing up whether to fund us: a committee, a lodge, a company, or someone who just wants to know where it goes before they give. Every figure on this page is one we can evidence.
Triffid is run entirely by volunteers. There are no salaries, no office, no management charge and no fundraising percentage. Weekly subs cover the ordinary running of a Monday night. Everything beyond that — camps, expeditions, equipment that lasts a decade — comes from grants, donations and the families themselves.
That is the whole reason we ask. A grant to a unit like this doesn't get diluted on its way to the young people, because there is nothing in between.
Kit is the clearest example. Bought once, owned by the unit, used by every Explorer who comes afterwards. The camping store bought in 2019 is still in service every camp, for young people who were at primary school when it arrived.
This website is another. A local firm, Fresh Tech, built it for us free of charge and goes on hosting it, maintaining it and adding to it for nothing, so it costs the unit no money to run and never will. That is the general pattern here: when something can be given rather than bought, it is.
Every supporter is named on the Wall of Honour, alongside the thing their money actually bought.
Not a category of spending. The thing itself, and what it still does.
A grant that kitted us out from scratch: patrol tents, an event shelter, a gas cooker, and the kitchen utensils and cutlery we still cook and eat with.
Seven years on, all of it is still in service. Every Explorer who has camped with us since 2019 has slept under something this grant bought, and the tents in it are the six we are now out of.
This is what equipment funding looks like years later: not a memory, an inventory.
£400 towards summer camp, put straight into the cost of getting there and into holding the price down for every family who wanted to come.
It went on the week itself rather than on kit, which is the other thing donations do here: they keep a camp affordable so that what a family can pay never decides who goes.
“This is a cause we are happy to support.”
Covid took Explorers apart in a way it didn't take the younger sections. We run from 14 to 18, so a couple of years of not meeting doesn't dent the numbers, it removes them: the oldest age out on schedule and nobody comes up behind. There was a point where whether Triffid reopened at all was a real question.
It reopened. It has been rebuilt one Monday at a time since, and there are now more Explorers on the roll than the unit can sleep. This summer's camp filled every tent we own and filled the minibus, without the whole unit coming.
That is the position funding meets today. Not a unit trying to survive, but one that has already done the hard part and has run into the ceiling that equipment sets.
See exactly what we're short ofWe would rather over-report than have you wonder. If you need something in a particular format for your own governance, ask and we'll write it.
If you're considering funding us, tell us what you need to know and we'll send it. If you'd rather see it first, come to a Monday and watch where it goes.