A CHARITY campaigner, described as the “driving force” behind several Gwent projects supporting the homeless and vulnerable, has died.

Rayner Rosser is remembered for helping to establish charity Newport Women’s Aid and for her work as a committee member of Family Care, which became Charter Housing.

Today, the firm manages a mix of around 5,000 acquired and purpose-built properties across Newport, Caerphilly, Torfaen and Monmouthshire.

Her son, Alan Baxter, described his mum as a committed community figure noting her work as a magistrate in Blackwood’s youth court and her time as a self-published author.

The Family Care group was formed in 1972 following a community campaign to find housing for a Newport single mother and at the time, had 79 properties for one-parent families on its books.

Mrs Rosser was part of a leadership group of volunteers which oversaw the hiring of a housing manager in in 1978 to expand the service to single people and the elderly.

In 1979, she helped found Newport Action for Single Homeless (NASH) to help homeless and other vulnerable people in Newport.

The organisation was later re-branded as Solas, in 2004, and has since expanded to the Chepstow, Pontypool and Caerphilly areas.

Both Charter Housing and Solas are now part of the Pobl Group which provides housing care and support to around 10,000 people in South Wales.

Mrs Rosser also became a development officer with mental health group Mind Cymru, in a bid to support vulnerable people in Abergavenny who had been released into society following the closure of mental health institutions.

Other positions included an assistant director role at the Welsh Centre for International Affairs, in Cardiff.

The mum-of-five also “indulged a lifelong passion for writing” by self-publishing ‘Collieries of the Sirhowy Valley’, a history of mines disappearing from Gwent landscape.

In her later life, she also worked as an officer in the Gwent County Council emergency planning unit, where she was involved in establishing rescue and evacuation guidelines for potential disaster scenarios.

Mrs Rosser retired due to ill health in 1988 and moved to Seaton in Devon after her husband, Gary, died in 2014. She was 85 when she died.

She is survived by five children and four grandchildren.