About The Carpe Diem Trust

carpe diem - seize the day

What is the Carpe Diem Trust?

Helping ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things
The Carpe Diem Trust is a new charity (Charity Number 1115061), due to begin operation in the second half of 2007. It will be a grant awarding body aimed at helping and motivating ordinary people to take control of their lives and to stretch the boundaries of their potential further than they thought possible.

By providing annual grants to qualifying individuals or groups, the Carpe Diem Trust will help people of all ages and from all walks of life to develop their full physical, intellectual, social, and spiritual potentials.

Who will the Carpe Diem Trust support?

The Carpe Diem Trust will support individuals or groups of individuals who are seeking to develop their personal potential through undertaking exciting and extraordinary journeys of self discovery and personal development.

Applicants for assistance should be planning to do so through unusual, demanding, challenging, arduous, interesting, exciting and/or extraordinary projects. The Carpe Diem Trust will generally, although not exclusively, be supporting expeditions, exploration and adventurous travel.

Priority will be given to ordinary and amateur people of all ages with limited or no prior experience in the project they propose to undertake. The Trust will not assist professional or experienced explorers, international athletes, or individuals who have already completed a similar project in the past.

The Trust will have a preference for projects that are being planned and executed with limited or no help and assistance from outside commercial organisations. Priority will also be given to projects that plan to raise money for charity or to provide a tangible benefit to the people, environment or society in the country where the project will take place.

Successful applicants will be expected to provide a report, and where possible photographs and video footage, to the Trustees once their project is complete.

Examples of projects the Carpe Diem Trust will consider supporting.

Full criteria for grant applications and details of the application process will be published on this website when the Trust is fully operational towards the end of 2007. The Trust aims to help ordinary people to achieve something extraordinary – but the definition of this will be different for different individuals. You don’t have to row an ocean to do something amazing.

The Trust aims to help ordinary people to develop their full physical, intellectual, social, and spiritual potentials, through undertaking a journey or project that is unusual, demanding, challenging, arduous, interesting, exciting and/or extraordinary. The following are examples of recent projects that the Trust might have supported. These are given for illustrative purposes only:

1. Two young gap year students who had never travelled overseas before raised the money to travel to Northern India to spend 5 months teaching English.

2. A sixteen year old schoolgirl who raised the money to travel to Costa Rica to work on a community project that improved training and education for the local farming community.

3. A fifty year old lady whose husband died of cancer. She was depressed and had no reason to get up in the mornings until she heard about the Atlantic Rowing Race. Inspired, she spent two years training and fundraising after which she became the oldest person ever to row an ocean, raising significant funds for cancer research. The project gave her a goal for those two years and rebuilt her confidence in herself.

4. A seventy nine year old lady with no higher education qualifications who, after being inspired by the lady above, decided to go back to school to study French. She joined her local sixth form college and passed her French A-Level two years later.

How will the Carpe Diem Trust work?

The Carpe Diem Trust will initially be a grant awarding body, and will NOT provide formal advice or practical support.

THE CARPE DIEM TRUST IS NOT CURRENTLY ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS FOR GRANTS.

The Carpe Diem Trust plans to begin accepting applications for grants from individuals or groups from the second half of 2007. Anyone wishing to make an application should watch this website for further details/instructions.
Applications for grants will be considered annually. The Trustees will consider all applications, and will each year select one or more to support. Each successful applicant will receive a one off grant of an amount decided by the Trustees. This amount will rarely fund a proposed project in its entirety, but should contribute towards a wider fundraising effort

The Trustees have absolute discretion over how many applications to support each year, and what size grant to award in each case. These will depend on income generated by the Trust the previous year, and the number and quality of the applications in that year. The Trustees may decide to award no grants in the event that no applications meet the criteria in any given year. The Trustees’ decision will be final and no correspondence will be entered into.

How you can help

The initial capital for the fund will be raised through sponsorship of the Carpe Diem Polar Expedition in which three of the Trustees (Richard Profit, Jan Meek and her son Dan Byles) will walk and ski to the Magnetic North Pole in April 2007. In doing so Jan and Dan will become the first ever mother and son to walk together to the Magnetic North Pole and Jan will be the oldest woman ever to do so. They intend to raise a significant sum in sponsorship in order to give the Trust a firm start. This will be the beginning of an ongoing fundraising effort to ensure that the Carpe Diem Trust continues to grow and develop into the future.

We urge you to support the Carpe Diem Trust by sponsoring this expedition. You can do so by following the sponsorship link.
Please help us to help others.

The Trustees

The Carpe Diem Trust will be managed and run by a committee consisting initially of three Trustees, rising to five once the Trust is established. The Trustees are volunteers and receive no payment for their time.

All of the Trustees are seasoned travellers and adventurers who over the years have faced physical and emotional challenges and overcome them, which they believe has helped form their character. All now wish to help others to achieve their personal potential through their work with the Trust.

The initial Trustees of The Carpe Diem Trust are:

Mrs Janice Meek FRGS

An entrepreneur with a fascinating background, Jan has achieved enough already to fill two lifetimes. In the 1960s she worked in the film industry with such characters as Roger Moore, Ian McShane, Sammy Davis Jnr and Jerry Lewis, and helped to make some iconic British television programs including Randall & Hopkirk, Department S and Z Cars.
After leaving the film industry Jan has worked for the United States Geological Survey in Saudi Arabia, has owned and run a children's clothes shop in the Cotswolds, has owned and run several restaurants, has been a wedding organiser and events manager, and is currently a motivational and business speaker. In addition, she has served as a non-executive director on the Heart of England Training and Enterprise Council, was the first ever female Chairman of the Chipping Norton Chamber of Commerce and is a former Mayor of Chipping Norton. In 1997 she successfully crossed the Atlantic Ocean unsupported in a 23 foot wooden rowing boat in 101 days with her son Dan, setting a new World Record for the oldest person to ever row across an ocean. Jan is a Trustee of the Ocean Rowing Society and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Major (Retd) Daniel Byles BA FRGS L/RAMC
A former Army officer who served with distinction, Dan completed two overseas operational tours of duty and at the age of 27 was one of the youngest Majors to work in the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall. He has travelled extensively and taken part in numerous winter mountaineering expeditions around the world.

In 1997 he successfully crossed the Atlantic Ocean unsupported in a 23 foot wooden rowing boat in 101 days with his mother, Jan. Having recently left the military, he is currently travelling around the world learning to sail ocean going yachts. Dan is a member of the Ocean Rowing Society and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Dr Jaishan Mahan MRCGP MRCSEd A&E FRGS

Since a young age Jaish has been interested in travel, mountaineering and adventure sports. He took part in his first expedition after school, spending a month in Belize as part of a diving group surveying the coral reef.

Since then he has qualified as a mountain leader and has led, or been part of the leadership of, expeditions to Bolivia, East Africa, Argentina, Peru, Malawi and the Alps. Jaish qualified as a doctor in 1997 and has since sub specialised in emergency medicine and general practice. He has combined his interest in expeditions with medicine and has lectured widely on the subject of ‘Altitude and Mountaineering Medicine’. Jaish has benefited significantly in the past from the support of different philanthropic organisations and hopes to be able to offer similar support to others through his trusteeship of Carpe Diem.

The Carpe Diem Trust Environmental Policy

In the pursuit of our goal to help provide opportunities for ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things, we recognise that our operation and the projects we support will inevitably have an impact on the environment. We wish to minimise and counter any potentially harmful effects of such activity wherever and whenever possible.

We have developed a policy statement which will enable us to set the standards by which our efforts towards helping people achieve their full potential can be carried out, with minimal or no social or environmental impact on our planet.

We have undertaken to help all people associated with The Carpe Diem Trust to understand and to implement the relevant aspects of this policy in their projects and expeditions, or their support to the trust. At Trustee level, The Carpe Diem Trust is committed to minimising the impact of its operation on the environment by means of a programme of continuous improvement.

In particular The Carpe Diem Trust will:

1. meet, and where appropriate, exceed the requirements of all relevant legislation - where no regulations exist The Carpe Diem Trust shall strive to set its own exacting standards;

2. promote recycling and the use of recycled materials, while reducing consumption of materials wherever possible;

3. minimise waste in all projects, and where waste is created ensure it is correctly disposed of;

4. promote an understanding and appreciation with its projects with regard to local environment, culture and respect wild life habitats;

5. monitor best practice, and off set its carbon emissions. Where possible to be carbon negative so as to offset more carbon than used in its activities to compensate for others who are not in a position to work for sustained environmental improvement.