The Smallwood Trust

Between December 2020 and May 2021 we are delivered a project that was designed to help visually impaired women to improve their financial literacy and money management skills. It was made possible by a grant from the Covid-19 Frontline Women’s Fund. This is jointly financed by the Smallwood Trust and the Lottery Community Fund. We were delighted to be working with the Smallwood Trust because they have been helping women on low incomes since 1886, which is more than 130 years ago. 

The Smallwood Trust’s mission is to enable women to become financially resilient by equipping them with the skills they need to secure a confident financial future. They provide grants to organisations like Insight Society and work with selected partners to help women overcome financial adversity and to improve their social and emotional well-being.

There are two important sections to the project:

We employed a temporary additional full-time member of staff. We will also recruited 4 additional bilingual volunteers. The grant paid the volunteer’s expenses and training costs and for DBS Disclosures. These additional human resources enabled us to significantly increase the number of home visits that we could make to our Service Users across Birmingham and the Black Country. Our staff, volunteers and directors were often the only people from outside their families that our Service Users meet regularly. Having someone to talk to in confidence about their health, welfare and personal finances was especially important to their financial resilience.

In view of this trend towards social media, part of the project includes appointing a firm of Social Media consultants to assist us to produce a strategy for supporting our Service Users online including a new web site.

The directors of Insight Society were aware that the company need to develop social media-based ways of communicating with our Service Users and to roll these out rapidly. While there is no substitute for a personal visitor the growing number of Service Users needed more support from Insight Society than home visits alone could provide.