My mother, Trisha Silvester, who has died aged 79, was a single mother, businesswoman and long-serving charity chair, whose talent for connecting people helped change the lives of mothers and children in rural Bangladesh.
As a young mother in the 1970s, she watched a television programme about Sandra Simpson, a Canadian woman who had established orphanages in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Trisha then met Sandra and travelled with her in 1977 to Dhaka, where Sandra had set up her orphanage in a large house in the city. This visit was to change the course of Trisha’s life. That year she started a charity, Families for Children (UK), to raise funds to support the project.
At the same orphanage, Trisha met two young girls, Sukuri and Hasina, aged two and four. She eventually brought them to the UK and adopted them, and, with my brother and me, the girls completed the family that Trisha had long hoped for.
In 1981, Pat Kerr, a British Airways flight attendant, visited the orphanage and felt the same sense of responsibility that my mother had. Pat took leave to volunteer, and she and Trisha soon formed a partnership with a bold vision. Raising money to buy land, they founded in 1989 the Sreepur Village, a charity that has offered refuge since then to thousands of women and children facing poverty and hardship.
The purpose-built village, two hours north of Dhaka, not only gives sanctuary to destitute families – accommodating some 350 people at any one time – but also provides vocational training for mothers as well as education for children. Some of the funds to support the village came from the sale in the UK of Christmas cards, made by women in the community for a living wage, an initiative supported by the Guardian over several years.
Trisha was appointed MBE in 2001. She served as the charity’s chair of trustees for more than 40 years, until 2019, and made regular visits from her home in south London. The organisation – known in Bangladesh as Shishu Polli Plus – continues to thrive.
Born in Bromley, Trisha was the daughter of Gordon Thompson, an insurance broker, and Doreen (nee Walter), a homemaker. She went to school at Bromley High, and enjoyed pursuits in her childhood that were to give her pleasure throughout her life: books, dogs, friendships and a liking for people who were fun and a little mischievous.
In 1966, she married Michael Silvester, whose PhD studies in chemistry took them to the US and Canada, then back to London. After three failed pregnancies she feared she might never have children, but she went on to have two sons, me and my younger brother, Daniel, with our adopted sisters joining the family in 1980.
Trisha’s impact went beyond the charity. She studied for an MBA at Greenwich University in the late 1990s and ran two early digital businesses, Answercall Limited and Computer Literacy Limited, all while raising her family on her own; my parents’ marriage ended in 1983.
She broadened the horizons of others with empathy and intelligence, gathering a large circle of friends around the world whom her family thought of as her “warrior women”. She could be direct, sometimes formidable, but the force behind it was a belief that people should be helped into opportunity.
Trisha is survived by her four children and eight grandchildren.
