A new funding partnership with City Bridge Foundation
Smallwood Trust are delighted to announce that we have been awarded £864,000 in funding from City Bridge Foundation, London’s largest independent charitable funder, to launch the Local Resilience Fund. Together with funding from Smallwood, this £1m programme will enable the co-design of grants alongside two local partnerships of women’s organisations and services in Hackney and Newham – to help them to tackle the root causes of gendered poverty, and collaborate to make significant change for women in these areas.
The Local Resilience Fund is supported by the Women’s Budget Group who are the Strategic Partner for the Fund. This approach has been informed by learning from our joint programme in Middlesbrough and support to three other place-based networks in Coventry, Birmingham and Wythenshawe.
Emma Crump, Head of Programmes at the Trust said:
“We are really excited by the partnership with City Bridge Foundation and the opportunity to co-design with women and the organisations that support them in Hackney and Newham. The worsening cost of living crisis for individual women and organisations and the overwhelming level of need in the two boroughs means this funding could not have come at a more needed time”.
Mary-Ann Stephenson, Director at Women’s Budget Group said:
“We are delighted to be part of this partnership with the Smallwood Trust. We know that women earn less, own less and are more likely to be poor. This has got worse following Covid, and now the cost of living crisis, coming on top of ten years of austerity policies. We’ve also seen through our work in Coventry and elsewhere that when women come together they can achieve real change. We are excited to find out what can be achieved by women in Hackney and Newham.”
The Smallwood Trust has been tackling gendered poverty for 136 years. Half of the UK population are women – therefore our approach not only matters for individual women, enabling them to thrive economically and overcome financially stressful events, it is also critical for the UK economy. While we will continue to meet the immediate needs of women facing financial insecurity, we will also increasingly focus on strategically tackling the systems that cause gendered poverty.
