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About us

Our mission is to enable women to become financially resilient by equipping them with the skills and support they need to secure a confident financial future. We have been helping UK women of out of poverty for 139 years. Our programmes provide grant funding and support to enable women to thrive and to ensure economic systems work for them rather than against them. Our approach not only matters for individual women, it is also critical for society. 

Smallwood’s governance and grant-making is shaped and led by the voices of women with lived, learned and professional experience of gendered poverty and our funding programmes are designed to build the capacity and capability of the ‘women’s sector’ to affect the change they wish to see.

Smallwood is an equitable and intersectional grant-maker and specialist funder, convenor and collaborator with co-design and evaluation at the heart of everything we do.

Our approach is crucial because UK Poverty is gendered. Women are more likely to live in poverty than men. Women’s poverty is largely explained by the unequal position of women in society which is exacerbated by caring status, ethnicity, health, age, sexuality, gender identity and disability. Systems such as the labour market, the design of social security and the role of paid and unpaid care all contribute to gendered poverty. Without a gender lens, existing gender inequalities are reinforced.

Smallwood’s grant-making has a dual approach and focus on tackling the root causes and systems that cause gendered poverty while continuing to meet the immediate needs of women facing financial insecurity.

We aim to have a strong focus on evaluation and learning to encourage collaboration, sharing of good practice and influencing for change. Through our grant funding, we are interested in:

Understanding the dynamics of an area including relationships, identities, power, history, physical spaces, institutional behaviours, customs, policies, practices and mindsets.

Building deep connections with communities—including people with lived and learned experience of issues—and building their power to influence the places in which they live.

Recognising issues are connected and tackling them from multiple angles, including addressing the underlying causes of issues and joining up different parts of the system.

Seeking holistic solutions, which are defined, generated and delivered locally.

Taking a long-term approach, for example providing longer-term funding that allows organisations to respond to a changing local context and tackle deep-rooted issues.

Finances

Our financial objectives are:

  • To increase our impact and build the Trust’s capacity for monitoring and evaluation so that all grant expenditure leads to increased knowledge of how to support women to become financially resilient

  • Work with the investment managers to increase the income from the endowment over the lifetime of the strategic plan

  • Manage the cash flow requirements of multi-year grants

  • Planned use of the expendable endowment in the medium term to support delivery of the strategic plan

At the time of writing we have permanent and expendable endowments with a total value of c.£28 million. These funds are managed by our external investment managers via a mandate agreed by the Board. In recent years, the Board have agreed to draw down additional capital funds to support the grant-making and a summary budget has been agreed for the period 2026 to 2028.

The Board has tested and refined two control measures which are used to assist Directors in their financial responsibilities. The Income Stabilisation Fund is a control measure used to manage how much of the charity’s capital has been drawn down to fund grant expenditure.

An additional control is that part of the Endowment Fund will be maintained in liquid funds available for short term drawdown. The remainder of the investments reflect the fact that the endowment is “in perpetuity” to be used for the designated beneficiaries. The second control measure is the Stress Test; whether the charity can continue to meet its obligations based on a clear set of criteria.

In 2025, the grants budget is over £4 million with 50% funded by Smallwood funds and 50% from external funding partners.

Further information and annual reports can be found on the Charity Commission website here: SMALLWOOD TRUST - 205798

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy

The Smallwood Trust is committed to promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in all aspects of our work, as we believe that embracing EDI is essential for achieving our mission of enabling women to become financially resilient. The Smallwood Trust has focused its EDI commitments in four key areas:

Grant-making and external partnerships

  • We have developed a gender-lens grant-making framework that takes an intersectional approach to grant-making and includes outcome goals such as system transformation, supporting partners to take a gender-lens approach, flexible funding, and supporting networks and communities to be more resilient.

  • We have invested significant grant funds in place-based systems change initiatives in addition to working with community grant partners to devolve funds locally to support individual women.

  • Our Gendered Poverty Learning Programme (GPLP), funded by the National Lottery Community Fund (TNLCF), offers a huge potential to develop our approaches around what works in terms of shifting power and being more accountable to the communities we fund.

  • The Trust has also made changes to our grant-making processes to make them more inclusive and we are committed to closing the gap in funding for organisations led by Black, Asian, and minoritised women and disabled women.

Board development, governance and accountability

  • We previously won the ‘Managing Turnaround’ category of the Charity Governance Awards for our approach to governance, which gave substantive and consistent consideration to beneficiaries. The Trust has adopted the Charity Governance Code and created a Governance Action Plan to set clear milestones in relation to organisational purpose, EDI, openness, and accountability.

  • The Board approved the pilot of the successful Board Shadowing Shadowing Programme which for the last three years has opened up our governance space to women with lived experience of gendered poverty. We are currently evaluating this programme and recommendations for the future will be published later this year.

Staffing and internal culture

  • We have appointed an external HR Adviser to help the CEO invest in the organisation’s culture, knowledge, systems, and skills and build our own capability to deliver on our plans. The Trust has also reviewed and updated our recruitment process, job description and person specification for new staff roles through an EDI lens and engaged an inclusive recruitment agency.

  • Additionally, we have designed tailored workshops for staff that addressed the beginning of their EDI journey, offered 1 to 1 coaching to staff on matters related to EDI, and engaged staff in EDI conversations by providing safe spaces. The Trust is implementing a People Strategy and providing ongoing support and training for staff.

Historical investments

  • Research has been undertaken into our historical investments building on previous findings. The learning from the current research will be harnessed as a further impetus to shift power across all of our work.

Further reading