£2.5m of COVID-19 funds to be awarded by December
Over 450 women’s sector organisations applied to our recently closed Women’s Sector Resilience Fund and our COVID-19 Frontline Women’s Fund, with a total of £2.5m to be awarded by the end of December 2020.
Both funds were urgently created to safeguard critical women’s sector organisation jobs and services during the COVID-19 pandemic with the Women’s Sector Resilience Fund (launched in September) being backed by the DCMS and the COVID-19 Frontline Women’s Fund (launched in October) being supported by the National Lottery Community Fund.
Information on the Women’s Sector Resilience Fund can be found here.
Information on the COVID-19 Frontline Women’s Fund can be found here.
The Smallwood Trust have a track-record of turning around grants at pace having already awarded £2.3m to women’s organisations and financially vulnerable women through our grant programmes between March and July 2020.
However, in order to create and deliver these two funds efficiently we recruited a team of expert assessors to review the applications once they had passed the initial eligibility check. Each application is then subject to a finance assessment and Safeguarding review before a Senior Executive recommends it to the newly appointed Grants Panel.
Finally, the Grants Panel make their decision, ensuring that all recipients meet the objectives of both Smallwood and the fund in enabling women to be financially resilient during the pandemic.
Emma Crump, Head of Evaluation at the Smallwood Trust said, “The large response clearly highlights how essential it is for these organisations to receive additional funding during this crisis. Our focus will also be on tackling the funding difficulties that many organisations fear when the new financial year starts in April 2021.”
More details of future funding opportunities will be announced throughout 2021, including Smallwood’s matched funding of £2.1m, as part of the agreement with DCMS.
