The future of a charity which encourages community groups to work together is under threat having lost a £13,000 annual grant.

Trowbridge community group’s organisers say the loss of the grant from Trowbridge Area Board risks its continuing.

Trowbridge Community Area Future (TCAF) was set up in 1996 to support and help local communities in Trowbridge, Southwick, Hilperton, North Bradley and West Ashton to work together.

It relies largely on volunteers and gets some money from Trowbridge Town Council, but also currently receives an annual grant of £13,402 from the board.

However, from April Wiltshire Council will only provide capital funding to area boards, which means TCAF’s revenue grant will cease.

Consequently, TCAF is applying for charitable status, but the future of the group remains uncertain.

Colin Kay, chairman of TCAF, said: “We applied for charitable status in November last year, but the application was turned down.

“We have since submitted another application and have a case worker, which is promising.

“The the council is under considerable pressure to keep making cuts so our revenue funding finishes in April.”

Representatives from TCAF spoke at the area board on January 15 and asked councillors to support its request to Wiltshire Council to provide a one-off grant to give the group time to become financially self-sufficient.

While the board said it recognised the good work of TCAF, it would be unable to support the request and encouraged the group to work with Trowbridge Town Council to consider other ways of applying for capital funding.

Mr Kay added: “We were trying to get the area board to support us in getting some funding in the interim to allow us to continue with projects, as it takes a long time to be self-sufficient.

“The town council has always been very supportive of us and we are now going to have to work with them to keep TCAF in existence while we try to get charitable status.”

Although TCAF depends mostly on volunteers, in order to have the capacity to run projects and support others, it employs a project officer, Lindsey Millen, for 16 hours a week and a project administrator, Izabela Wanoth, for 10 hours a week.

Last year, TCAF led or was a partner in a significant number of projects, playing a key role in raising £165,000 of funding for local community groups to take forward their own activities.