Smallwood Trust response to racist attacks
A month ago, coordinated racist and Islamophobic attacks violently rocked the UK. The Smallwood Trust and our grant partners were angry and sickened by the racist attacks; some of the people we work with have been directly harmed.
As we said in the days following the worst displays of violence, the Smallwood Trust is committed to standing by and providing continued support to our grant partners. The work we all do, particularly those on the frontline, is hard enough without this hatred and fear.
Our partners’ experiences have been shocking. The actions of racists have forced services to close and women’s mental health to plummet. This is causing lasting harm and seriously affecting individuals’ levels of anxiety, worry, and depression. Many women have been too afraid to go out for fear of attacks. For those who are in jobs with zero-hours contracts this means they are not receiving an income. This, in turn, leaves them isolated in their homes.
Women have had abuse hurled at them including on public transport and when they are in their local parks with their children. For some partners, the racist attacks brought back the trauma of previous incidents. Additionally, our partners’ staff have themselves been subjected to abuse and affected while supporting their clients.
In the week that followed the worst violence we established a discretionary fund of £50,000 which we then awarded as emergency funding to support our grant partners immediately affected by the violence and racism.
The immediate funding we released to our grant partners allowed for urgent support including supplying food parcels, taxis for safe passage for staff and clients and other basic needs for those at risk of attack including moving asylum-seeking clients into emergency accommodation. This ensured services remained open and women could access them with increased safety. This in turn means that our core mission to build financial resilience and financial autonomy can continue.
For our £2.2 Million Women’s Urgent Support Fund, which includes targeting organisations that are supporting communities affected by racial injustice, we have increased the flexibility and scope of the fund so that organisations can include short- and medium-term responses that will support their communities to respond and recover. For all our current partners we have offered flexibility in pivoting funding wherever possible.
However, we and our grant partners are all very aware that we do not want to address this urgency purely with short-term response. We and our grant partners stand together against the racist hatred and violence, and we work towards ending the structurally racist injustice, particularly where it intersects with women of colour and immigrants, and leads to their financial difficulties.
The violence our partners experienced in August was a flashpoint, and while the violence has subsided, the women we support will be left navigating the financial and emotional aftershocks for many months to come.
We continue to take a long-term approach to systems change towards ending the structural racist injustice that leads to financial difficulties. This approach runs through everything we do. We fund organisations that are led by and for racially minoritised women.
We are also funding a network of partners in Birmingham who focus on challenging the structural barriers experienced by women with no recourse to public funds. Our Local Resilience Fund aims to support organisations who help women experiencing gendered poverty from Asylum/refugee and migrant backgrounds who may have additional layers of oppression affecting their lives.
Our work is long term and continuously informed by learning from our partners. We have been funding our place-based and community grant partnerships for over six years. By working together and taking a long-term approach together we have analysed the systemic barriers faced. We have implemented practices to make power sharing meaningful and lasting include funding flexibly, moving at a pace that suits our partners and practising persistent engagement.
Systems change work needs deep, long-term investment and care in the most affected communities. The Smallwood Trust and our partners will continue to centre the experience, voices and expertise of those most affected by long-term structural injustice in our work. We focus on shifting power models as a means to break down barriers and promote increased equity, diversity, and inclusion, with a main objective of alleviating gender-based poverty.
Through this work we and our partners do, we believe we can start to dismantle the unjust systems that form a financial barrier to the equitable society to which all women should all be able to lay claim.
We know it will take a collaborative effort. If you would like to work with us to tackle gendered poverty, please get in touch with Smallwood Trust’s CEO Paul Carbury.
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