Ten years of The Duchess of Cornwall's ShelterBox Presidency

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Her Royal Highness's Presidency of ShelterBox.

The Duchess of Cornwall and The Prince of Wales were first introduced to ShelterBox in 2006. While on an official visit to Pakistan, they learnt about ShelterBox's work supporting villages and families who had lost their homes in the Kashmiri earthquake. The disaster relief programme impressed Her Royal Highness, and she has been a firm supporter of the charity ever since, and became President and Royal Patron in August 2007.

This July, Her Royal Highness visited the new ShelterBox headquarters in Truro, which features a public exhibition – the ShelterBox Disaster Relief Visitor Centre – which has interactive displays telling ShelterBox’s story and explaining the build-up to a disaster and how decisions are made to send aid around the world.

The Duchess of Cornwall was shown through the new visitor centre and met groups of local schoolchildren learning about the charity, their vast operations and the contents of the famous green box distributed around the world to offer relief and aid. The Duchess also received a briefing from the ShelterBox Operations team, who showed her where the charity is working in the world at present.

ShelterBox is an international disaster relief agency based in Cornwall. There are now almost 85 million people around the world forced from their homes due to natural disasters or conflict, the greatest number since World War II.

ShelterBox is becoming a world authority on providing innovative, rapid and practical shelter to families in some of the world’s hardest-to- reach places and most devastated disaster zones. Since its start in 2000, it’s helped more than one million people worldwide to rebuild their lives and now has affiliate ShelterBox operations across Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia.