ANNA Marsden is to retire as director of the Wiltshire and Swindon Community Foundation next year.

Although the former PE teacher is not intending to leave the Devizes-based organisation until next summer, she wanted to give the trustees of the foundation enough notice to recruit her replacement.

She will be a hard act to follow. In 1989 she answered a recruitment advert in the Marlborough Times to become the first paid employee of what was then the Thamesdown Community Trust, a voluntary organisation that had been raising money for local good causes for the previous 15 years.

Ms Marsden, 55, said: "I had moved to Marlborough to be with my partner. I was working part-time at the local branch of Victoria Wine. I had done a course in leisure and recreation studies at North London Poly and was looking for something in that field.

"The community trust job was for 19 hours a week for one year only, so I thought it would do until something better came up. Fourteen years later I'm still here."

One of her first meetings in her new post set the agenda for the rest of her stay at what eventually became the Wiltshire and Swindon Community Foundation.

She said: "I had a 10am meeting at Intel in Swindon, where I met the director of a community foundation in Milwaukee, USA. The message he gave me was think big. It was a most inspiring start."

Ms Marsden set about creating an endowment fund, whereby major companies pledged money for a sinking fund which would produce enough interest to finance grant aid to local good causes.

An American foundation put up £1 million towards this, matched by another £1 million from the Charities Aid Foundation.

The foundation came to national prominence with the publication, in 1994, of its report Communities at Risk in Wiltshire, documenting in great detail the pockets of severe social isolation and economic deprivation in the otherwise affluent rural community.

Ms Marsden said: "Many people were shocked by the findings. We got our first £100,000 donation to the endowment fund on the back of that."

In addition to the endowment fund, the foundation administers 77 individual funds for companies, ranging from £5,000 to over £100,000. So far this financial year, the foundation has handed out £344,300 to 154 groups in the county.

It supports where relatively small outlays can have dramatic effects.

Ms Marsden said: "We were approached by a luncheon club for older people who wanted money to buy pots and pans, but it transpired they had a waiting list of 12 people. There weren't enough comfortable chairs to go around. So we bought them more chairs.

"A severely disabled woman was able to complete her A-levels and take charge of her own life through help from the Independent Living Fund.

"The single most rewarding aspect of my work is seeing how people's lives have been changed for the better by the money we have channelled into community groups."