Transforming Support for Chemical Engineers and their Families

The Chemical Engineers’ Benevolent Fund is changing to better serve chemical engineers worldwide, tackling modern challenges with tailored assistance and outreach. Sam Baker finds out more

WHEN Stephen Richardson was appointed chair of the trustees of the Chemical Engineers’ Benevolent Fund (CEBF) in November 2022, he says “it was obvious we needed to change”. Since taking on the role, he has made it his goal to shake up the charity, making it more equipped to understand and tackle the problems facing today’s chemical engineers.

The CEBF was established as an independent charity in 1928 with a founding mission to help chemical engineers in “necessitous and straightened circumstances”. Since then, it has “sort of just sat there for 90 years”, according to the charity’s manager Paul Day, appointed in 2024, who felt the organisation had not adequately moved into the 21st century.

“We were very much lagging behind as a charity,” Day tells TCE. While equivalent charities across STEM professions, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemists’ Community Fund, have for many years been supporting hundreds of people each year, the CEBF supported just 17 in 2023. Amid a major revamp of the charity, supercharged by Richardson and Day throughout 2024, the charity has more than trebled the number of people on its caseload.

Person-specific support

Richardson served as IChemE’s president from 2019 to 2021. Before he took up his post as CEBF chair, the benevolent fund essentially served as a piggy bank for chemical engineers who had fallen on hard times – a “here’s some money, off you go” approach, as Day puts it. The charity now advertises support “specific to a person’s individual circumstances” such as grants for energy costs or school uniform, as well as offering advice on state benefits. Indeed, Day has identified £30,000 (US$37,000) worth of state benefits that went unclaimed by eligible IChemE members in 2024.

The charity also hopes to provide a more comprehensive mental health service, the most common issue chemical engineers would like more support with, according to a recent TCE reader survey.

One sector for which Richardson expects the charity to be in high demand in coming years is oil and gas. He tells TCE that as fossil fuels “become dirtier and dirtier words” a swathe of mid-career workers who assumed they had stable jobs for life will now need to reskill. In addition to financial assistance, the CEBF connects unemployed members with a career coach.

CEBF in action

Paddy Hall and his wife Denise received help from the benevolent fund in 2024. After his Parkinson’s diagnosis, Paddy learned last year that he also had progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare degenerative brain disorder that impedes movement, balance, and speech.

As the condition worsened, everyday home tasks, such as walking upstairs for a shower, became more and more difficult for Paddy, a chemical engineer for over 45 years in a career that took the couple from Norfolk to Texas to Germany. “I could see that this was more and more of a challenge each day,” said Denise, Paddy’s wife of 57 years. “I was filled with worry that he might end up falling.

“It’s difficult to see someone you love going through something as hard as this.”

The benevolent fund provided the couple with a £5,000 grant to install a shower downstairs in their house in June 2024. Denise said at the time: “We all take something as simple as being able to take a shower in our own home for granted. It brings us both such joy that he’s been given this little piece of his life back.”

Paddy has since moved into a nursing home following a deterioration in October, but Denise tells TCE that for the months they had the downstairs shower “it really meant a lot to him”.