Beyond the spreadsheets: Reimagining the role of evidence in funding place-based systems change
August 7, 2026Guest blog by Renaisi
As Smallwood Trust’s learning partner for our place-based systems change work over the past three years, Renaisi reflect on what we have learned about evidence, evaluation and understanding change below:
Gendered poverty sits at the messy intersection of ingrained attitudes (including racism, sexism and classism), broken public services, economic challenges driving increases in the cost of living and a housing crisis, and harmful policies such as No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF). It is a systemic issue, rather than one that can be responded to via isolated, one-off interventions.
Because of this, Smallwood Trust chose to invest in supporting place-based partnerships to understand what it takes to bring systemic change for women experiencing poverty. To ensure that this work could be a source of deep learning and evidence, Smallwood Trust engaged us at Renaisi-TSIP as their learning partner for the three years of the programme.
Smallwood Trust’s journey in place-based funding began with supporting Coventry Women’s Partnership in 2018 to develop a model for place-based, joined-up service delivery. In 2022, this work expanded through the Women’s Sector Resilience Fund 2 to support two additional place-based networks working towards systems change in Birmingham and Wythenshawe, Manchester. Across the three places, the programme sought to deepen understanding of what it takes to shift gendered poverty, engage the voices of women with lived experience, build influential relationships across local systems, and test new approaches to creating change.
In 2023, Smallwood Trust expanded this work further through the launch of a programme to develop networks that build learning, power and influence within the women’s sector. Through this programme, Smallwood Trust partnered with three additional networks in Leicestershire, Brighton and Hove, and the North East of England. Supported by funding from the National Lottery Community Fund, the programme aimed to strengthen local capacity for learning, collaboration and influence, enabling partners to coordinate network-building activities and contribute to systemic change in their places.
While work has been at different timelines, scales and ambitions, both programmes contribute to Smallwood Trust’s Gendered Poverty Learning Programme through generating learning and evidence around how a systems change approach can shift gendered poverty. For more information on the impact of this work, please check out our learning reports below:
Moving towards measuring what matters
At Renaisi-TSIP we know that traditional approaches to monitoring and evaluation often fail to capture the changes in relationships, processes and attitudes that emerge through place-based systems change work. Because traditional evaluation methods can’t provide evidence around the impact of this work, relying on these methods can make it hard for funders and delivery organisations to make the case for ongoing funding for place-based systems change work. In this context resource is often channelled towards the things that feel measurable, rather than the things that are driving deep-rooted, long-term structural change.
Because of this we have developed a methodology for evidencing place-based systems change that allows us to assess impact and understand how change is being driven. Applying this to our work with Smallwood Trust, we began the learning partnership with a workshop bringing together the three place-based networks to collectively articulate what a place-based systems change approach to gendered poverty would look like.
Through this, the networks identified five common areas of change that they believed would emerge if their work was successful:
- Improving services and support available for women.
- Developing collaborative relationships and processes.
- Centring the lived experience of women.
- Influencing beyond the networks.
- Ongoing learning and adaptation.
These provided the basis for us to understand the types of change that would be driven by a place-based systems change approach to gendered poverty. We used these as a framework to capture data and track evidence of change throughout the programme. For more detail on the evidence that emerged in the programme, check out our learning reports listed above.
Evidence as a tool for systems change
Throughout the programme, we were also able to learn about how the networks were able to practically use evidence as a tool to support their systems change work. We saw this happen in three distinct ways:
1. To build a shared commitment to change
Instead of using learning and evaluation tools that are developed by distant “experts”, the networks co-designed their own tools to build a shared commitment to their ambitions for systems change.
- In Birmingham, the NRPF Women’s Support Network devoted time at the beginning of their work to collaborate with us to develop a theory of change, which set out their vision, goals for systems change and the shorter-term changes they expected to see if things were going well. The network reflected that this process was critical in building trust and alignment across the organisations in the network, which has continued to strengthen as we’ve brought staff together on a yearly basis to review their progress against the theory of change, reflect on learning and think through how they can strengthen their approach.
- In Wythenshawe, the Women of Wythenshawe (WoW) network ensured that WoW Leaders, who are local Wythenshawe women with lived experience of poverty, participated in co-production workshops that we facilitated to develop an evaluation framework for their work. Participating in this process supported local leaders to collectively think through how the network would achieve its long-term goals and feel ownership over its strategic direction.
2. To expose where systems are failing women
Traditional data can often hide the compounding barriers women face, failing to show how a women’s experience is driven by many elements of the system failing them at once. The networks are changing this by leveraging data from service delivery, frontline insights and lived experiences to paint a richer picture of the system women are experiencing locally.
- The Coventry Women’s Partnership has intentionally gathered evidence of the gendered impacts of public service and policy to strengthen calls for national policy changes. In the first five years of CWP’s work, they collaborated with Women’s Budget Group, who collected evidence from their work to develop a series of papers illustrating the impact of policies on women from multiple perspectives. Partners shared that this work increased their profile nationally and has given their local advocacy more weight, building the case for holistic, women-centred services.
- The Transforming Together Network in the North East of England mapped out data on commissioned refuge bed spaces to show a massive gap for women with multiple disadvantages. They then triangulated this numbers-based gap with the lived experiences of women and frontline staff to build a clear case for commissioning women-only spaces.
- In Wythenshawe, WoW Leaders used their lived experiences of housing insecurity, domestic abuse and caring for children with SEND to develop evidence-based interventions that can change these systems. This has included developing training programmes for staff at frontline services around Domestic Abuse Action Group and for mothers of children with SEND, to support them to better understand how to navigate accessing support.
3. To target the root causes of systemic problems
Instead of responding with the same services and interventions that only really put a bandage on the symptoms of a failing system, networks used participatory systems mapping and research to identify how to target the root causes of systemic problems.
- Engaging in systems mapping workshops with us allowed the Birmingham NRPF Women’s Support Network to target their influence towards where they could practically drive change without becoming overwhelmed by the massive scale of the immigration system they were up against. They identified two entry points: strategic litigation to expand access to the legal avenues that enable women with NRPF who experience domestic abuse to access public funds; and focused local advocacy to embed considerations around the needs of women with NRPF into statutory policy. This focus enabled them to successfully bring a case against the Home Office which has meant that more women with NRPF are eligible for the Migrant Victims of Domestic Abuse Concession (MVDAC), which enables those experiencing domestic abuse to access public funds.
- In Wythenshawe, the systems mapping workshops we facilitated for WoW Leaders helped them identify that a lack of investment in new social housing was a direct driver of long-term temporary accommodation loops, causing severe damage to women’s mental health, relationships, and employment. In response, they launched the Social Homes for Manchester Campaign to fight for city-wide policy shifts.
- In Brighton and Hove, Surviving Economic Abuseconducted research with women with lived experience and a range of frontline practitioners to understand experiences of and responses to economic abuse. These insights equipped them to develop a practical national screening tool, training programme and advocacy model that responds to the systemic overlooking of economic abuse.
And what does this mean for funding practice?
If you want to dismantle gendered poverty, your approach to funding cannot rely on approaches to evidence and evaluation which maintain the status quo.
In a recent inquiry into what it takes to sustain place-based systems change, we found that funding lasting systems change requires resourcing places to “collectively test, experiment, pause, learn and adapt.” Our work with Smallwood Trust demonstrated what this can look like in practice. Supporting an approach to evidencing which can drive systemic work looks like:
- Funding places to collect evidence that currently isn’t valued or acknowledged by the current system, this includes engaging those with lived experience of harm in storytelling and decision-making alongside leaning on the insights of frontline staff.
- Investing in the support needed for places to co-design learning and evaluation approaches that support them to align, learn, adapt and demonstrate impact on their own terms.
- Shifting away from monitoring processes that ask grant holders to evidence short-term impact against pre-set goals in order to access continuation funding, towards an approach which supports grant holders to focus on their own long-term goals.
- Investing in infrastructure for places to learn from each other, build solidarity and share evidence to influence change. This includes peer learning networks that create space for individuals from across different places to share learning, collectively work through challenges, identify patterns emerging across places and highlight where national systems change is needed to unlock change at a local level.
By shifting to seeing evidencing as a tool for systems change, rather than a tool for monitoring and accountability, we can move past transactional grant making and begin resourcing the deep, structural, long-term transformation needed to dismantle gendered poverty.
You can learn more about the places mentioned above through the following reports:
https://www.smallwoodtrust.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/WoW-Report-Summer-2025_Final.pdf
