A Dissolved Trust, a $2.6 Million Balance and Two St Elizabeth Churches

• The former board of a trust closed in 2021 gave its remaining J$2.6 million to two Malvern churches
• St Albans Anglican and Bethlehem Moravian will each receive $1.3 million
• The money will help students affected by Hurricane Melissa
• The Moravian church has named a nearby primary school building after the educator

Five years after it closed, a small family trust in honour of a St Elizabeth educator has found a use for its leftover money. The former board of the Mavis Fraser-Davis Trust handed J$2.6 million to St Albans Anglican Church and Bethlehem Moravian Church in Malvern on February 1, 2026, the Gleaner reported. Each church receives $1.3 million to help students hurt by Hurricane Melissa.

The trust was set up in 1998 to honour Mavis Fraser-Davis, a Malvern educator with close ties to both churches, by her brother, the late Rev James Oswald Thorbourne. It was dissolved in 2021 after board members left, but a balance from fundraising between 2015 and 2018 remained in its account. “We had been debating how best to deal with it,” said Paul Thorbourne, her grandnephew and a former board member. “But after Hurricane Melissa came and did her damage, we said that maybe the Lord would wish us to just give the balance of the funds to the two churches which we have been trying to assist.”

St Albans’ share will support students at the affiliated St Albans Primary School and create a scholarship in Fraser-Davis’ name. Bethlehem Moravian will use its share for youth development, and the church has also named a nearby primary school building after her. “This donation will significantly advance our youth work in our church, because it is quite a number of students and other community children that come to our Sunday school who will benefit from this,” said Rev Sacha Lambert, the church’s minister.

Thorbourne said he was satisfied the trust could help needy students in St Elizabeth, as it was set up to do, “especially at this time, after the ravage of Hurricane Melissa”.

The story is a small lesson in how family money can keep working after the family has moved on. A trust that no longer had a board still had cash, and the simplest way to put it to use was through institutions that already serve the community: two churches and their schools. For families in the diaspora thinking about honouring a relative at home, the practical point is to plan for what happens to the money when trustees move away or die, and to consider whether a local church, school or registered charity is better placed to hold and spend it.

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