The Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe was established on 31 October 1861, originally under the name Europena Zarthost Dharmanu Khatu, at a meeting of fifteen people held at the London residence of Muncherjee Hormusji Cama, together with Dadabhai Naoroji. Its founding purposes were practical rather than ceremonial: to purchase land for the burial of the dead, to help stranded or destitute Zoroastrians, and to produce books on Zoroastrianism.

Those purposes reflected the community's actual size at the time. England's Zoroastrian population numbered roughly fifty people when the Trust was founded, mostly students, a population small enough that a single meeting of fifteen founders represented a meaningful fraction of the whole community rather than a token gathering. The Trust was historically governed by a body of managing trustees that included student representatives at Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh, tying its governance directly to the student population its founding purposes were built around.

The Trust incorporated as a UK charity in 1978, more than a century after its 1861 founding, formalizing a structure that had already been operating under trustee governance for generations.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Since 1987 the Trust has run the Poor Peoples Project, a fund continuing a programme the Mumbai-based charity Zoroastrian Studies had already begun in 1979, eight years before the Trust took it up. The Project distributes funds monthly to needy Zoroastrians in Mumbai, Udvada and Navsari, India, three cities with long-established Zoroastrian communities, through the partner agency Zoroastrian Studies rather than through a UK office administering payments directly.

The Trust's own audited financial statements record 255,897 pounds sterling in donations and legacies received into the fund during the year ending 31 March 2025, split between 105,909 pounds unrestricted and 149,988 pounds restricted funds, a division that shows most of the year's giving arrived already earmarked for the Project rather than as general donations the trustees could redirect.

Alongside the Poor Peoples Project the Trust has periodically issued emergency medical relief appeals for members of the Zoroastrian community, a second and less routine channel of support that supplements the fund's regular monthly distributions in Mumbai, Udvada and Navsari.