Smart Works is a UK charity that dresses and coaches unemployed women for their job interview. We empower each woman by giving her the clothes and the confidence she needs to succeed.
Smart Works Greater Manchester opened in June 2015, the first Smart Works centre in England outside of London. Since then, we’ve helped over 1800 women in need, providing each with a complete outfit of high-quality interview clothes and accessories (hers to keep) and one-to-one interview training. We are proud that 70% have gone on to succeed at their job interviews, despite more than half having been unsuccessful in over 20 job applications, and a third having been turned down for more than 50 jobs
Our ambition is to continue to expand our service to help more women in our region. In support of this we are seeking an additional Trustee who shares the values of Smart Work’s mission, aims and objectives to join our proactive and hard-working Board.
The Smart Works Greater Manchester Board is responsible for overall governance and risk management, determining SWGM’s strategic direction, maintaining a long-term overview of the organisation and its work, ensuring SWGM’s financial health and compliance with legal obligations, including as employers of our small team of employees.
We are now seeking an additional Trustee with experience and expertise in the education sector, someone who can bring a deep understanding of how the sector operates across the North West and can lead on helping SWGM widen its reach in the sector and build uptake of our service particularly amongst unemployed young women and women from communities currently unrepresented amongst our service users. Experience at a senior level or of a similar role with another organisation or charity would also be welcome.
We are keen to ensure our board is diverse, inclusive and represents the breadth of women we support. We are therefore particularly interested in receiving applications from potential Trustees from a range of backgrounds, the BAME community or those with lived experience relevant to our cause.
More info and how to apply can be found here.
Please also complete and send an equalities and monitoring form with your application.
Please note this post is unremunerated.
The theme of International Women’s Day 2021 was ‘Choose to Challenge’ and all of our campaign fund raisers certainly did that!
Our participants fervour and commitment this year has been spectacular and raised an astonishing amount of money. Collectively raising over £38k, plus gift aid, from 1,400 individual donors, which is way beyond our hopes and expectations. Nationally the campaign has been its biggest and best ever, with well over £200k raised.
These funds will be vital to our service delivery over the coming year. We look forward, enthusiastically, to opening our doors once again shortly to welcome women into our service, adhering to all our Covid safe procedures and practices. This year we will strive to support even more women than we have before, through both our in-person appointments and our remote services.
We feel both confident in our endeavours and unstoppable, you’ve made us feel like that. So, in the words of Tony Walsh, from his poem ‘This Is The Place’:
“You can live local, give local. We can honestly say
We do charity differently, that Mancunian Way”
So to those who have participated or given sponsorship, thank you for everything you have done for us and for the unemployed women we support.