Refining Smallwood’s Strategy: Learning and Direction of Travel
March 16, 2026Over the past year we have been working closely with trustees, grant partners and other stakeholders to refine the next phase of Smallwood’s strategy.
This work is part of a wider reflection as the Trust approaches its 140th anniversary, and builds on the evolution of our grantmaking over the past decade. During that time, Smallwood has moved from primarily providing small relief grants to individuals towards a model that combines direct support, long-term funding for women-led organisations, and place-based work aimed at tackling the structural drivers of gendered poverty.
We will publish the full strategy later this year. In the meantime, we wanted to share some of the direction of travel emerging from our discussions and learning.
Building on what we know works
One of the strongest themes emerging from our recent learning session with trustees was the importance of continuing to connect immediate support for women in hardship with longer-term change in the systems that shape women’s lives.
Across our programmes we see every day how women experience poverty not as a single event, but as the result of multiple systems failing at once — from welfare and housing to employment, immigration and responses to violence and abuse.
Our developing strategy therefore focuses on strengthening the connections between:
- Frontline support, helping women navigate immediate financial crisis and instability
- Women-led organisations, which hold trusted relationships within communities and provide sustained support
- Place-based partnerships, bringing together local organisations and public institutions to address systemic barriers
- National learning and influence, ensuring that evidence from local change informs wider policy and practice.
Rather than seeing services and systems change as separate activities, the aim is to bind them together, so that frontline experience informs structural change.
Deepening place-based work
A second area of development is the continued growth of our place-based approach.
In a number of locations we are supporting partnerships that bring together women’s organisations, public services and other local actors to understand where systems are failing women and to test new responses.
This work recognises that sustainable change often happens locally and collaboratively, and that women-led organisations are essential partners in shaping solutions that work in practice.
Strengthening learning and evidence
Another key theme emerging from recent discussions is the importance of learning and evaluation.
Because systems change work is complex and long-term, we are exploring approaches to evaluation that allow us to:
- learn in real time
- capture evidence from lived experience and organisational practice
- understand where change is happening across individual, organisational and system levels.
Developing a strong learning framework will be an important part of the strategy as it evolves.
Working with partners
Alongside our endowment, partnerships with other funders are increasingly enabling Smallwood to expand the scale and reach of our work.
These collaborations allow us to support more organisations working with women in hardship and to deepen the place-based partnerships that are central to the emerging strategy.
Continuing the conversation
The strategy is still being refined with trustees and partners, and we expect to publish the full framework later this year.
In the meantime, the direction of travel is clear: continuing to support women facing economic hardship today, while working with partners to change the systems that repeatedly pull women back into poverty.
We will continue to share learning as this work develops.
