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Smallwood Trust launch three-year Strategic Plan to tackle gendered poverty

The Smallwood Trust has been helping women across the UK out of poverty for 135 years and we are delighted to be publishing our Strategic Plan 2022-24 which has been developed to accelerate our ongoing mission to tackle the root causes of gendered poverty.

Read our Strategic Plan 2022-24 Summary
Read our Strategic Plan 2022-24

Our new plan follows our response to the COVID-19 crisis where we tripled our grant expenditure from £1.4m in 2019 to £4.5m in 2020. It has also been influenced by the past five years of the Trust supporting a growing ‘eco-system’ of funding to individuals, organisations and policy and influencing activities.

To achieve our ambitions, we are continuing to invest in our people and infrastructure to support and work alongside communities to develop workable models that improve economic and social outcomes for women. As a result, we are recruiting for two new roles that are now open for applications:

Head of Impact and Learning
Finance and Resources Manager

Our Strategic Plan outlines our mission to finding solutions to the root causes of gendered poverty so that:

  1. UK women are free from poverty and have a sustainable and secure financial future
  2. Future generations of UK women are less likely to live in poverty
  3. UK women can live in a society that equally values their contribution

Evaluating our progress is a key component of our plan particularly in relation to our main priorities which are to:

  1. Target our funding to women who are most at risk of poverty, enabling them to have more power, opportunity and skills to thrive and become financially resilient
  2. Develop workable place-based models that tackle the root causes of gendered poverty and have the potential to scale or be adopted elsewhere
  3. Support accessible and sustainable networks for women enabling them to be empowered and have agency within their local communities

Significantly, the Board have agreed to make an additional £5m available from our expendable endowment over the next three years to supplement the annual income from our investments and any external funds that we secure as a crucial part of our plan’s commitment to ‘making it happen’.

We will also continue to develop and expand our community grant partnerships model which has been successful by shifting power to local organisations so they can award grants and provide support to individual women using their own expertise.

Paul Carbury, Chief Executive of the Trust said: “The Smallwood Trust has a clear and defined role in providing gender-focused funding and this new plan reflects the critical need to advance our ongoing response to tackling the root causes of gendered poverty as well as empowering other organisations and networks to do the same.”

Click here to read our Strategic Plan 2022-24 Summary
Click here to read our Strategic Plan 2022-24

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