The Croft CIC Corporate Profile

Who We Are?

A national community company combining decades of human experience with clever digital tools.

What We Do?

We use data, research, and technology to connect disconnected communities and improve local services.

Our Community Heart

Providing local non-place spaces and resources for connection, learning, and local cultural expression.

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Roots x Culture

The Croft Sprouting Circuits

Welcome to The Croft: an agile, responsive consultancy stacked with corporate credentials, mesh networks, and tech talk—yet our values are entirely homegrown.

Our name is deeply intentional. We operate as a contemporary equivalent for the digital age: cultivating commons, restoring roots, strengthening systems, and animating enterprise.

We’re a local company with a global dialect. Cognitive diversity and lived experience transform how we approach consultation, allowing us to pioneer a unique pavement-to-policy process. So, while we conduct lofty business in the Cloud, our roots remain firmly geographic and deeply embedded in the County’s community.

The Croft Geometric Tree

As a family business, we place the highest value on our heritage, neurodiversity, and frontline expertise. By leveraging half a century of social science and social work, we design frameworks that deliver genuinely sustainable, successful outcomes.

We combine our roots and culture with clever digital tools to provide new approaches to community empowerment, inclusion, and connection right here across County Durham.

Using our access to national and international financing, we harvest multinational revenue streams to delineate downstream. We then systematically reinvest those resources straight back into countywide initiatives that fit our core criteria: Culture, Community, and Connectivity.

"Or as we call it, going with the flow."
Sue Straughair

Sue Straughair

FOUNDER + GOVERNANCE LEAD

The origin and source. A Teesside-based social scientist and former senior civil servant, Sue pioneered computational methods of community engagement across the North East in the early ’90s, utilizing emerging technologies to master temporal scarcity. Operating as UPDATE, she championed socio-digital research, development, and delivery through major commissions with GOV.UK, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), Arthritis Care, and the BDA. Now a dedicated fundraiser for GNAAS and Co-Founder of The Croft, Sue brings enviable, meta-level lived local experience to the team. Her foundational expertise ensures our systems, policy governance, and delivery frameworks remain at the absolute highest standard.

Ben Straughair

Ben Straughair

FOUNDER + STRATEGIC LEAD

As the Founder of The Croft and LISTENai, Ben brings 30 years of cross-sector "design-to-delivery" experience spanning the Arts, DJ culture, and SEN/PRU youth work. Academically trained at The Bauman Institute under Zygmunt Bauman, he champions a "Liquid Sociology" approach to civic regeneration. Leveraging decades of lived experience and championing neurodiversity, Ben designs inclusive, person-centred strategies that prioritize "Social Scaffolding"—focusing on healing organizational narratives rather than simply "fixing" them. As Strategic Lead, he architects macro-level infrastructure projects and deploys "Phygital" community hubs to combat digital poverty, ensuring global digital strategies always resonate with local human dialects.

PROCUREMENT & INQUIRIES

Corporate Details

Email ben@thecroft.online
Landline 01388 358380
Mobile 07356246010
Location 15 Fern Valley, Crook,
County Durham, DL15 9PZ
Croft Foundational Bedrock
C-Vault Security Illustration

C-Vault & GDPR Reassurance

The Croft confirms all personal data for this initiative is processed securely and with full transparency, in compliance with GDPR.

Your data is your own; our processes are designed to be privacy-first and participatory, with full data sovereignty for the community. We execute a Zero-Harvest Infrastructure.