History

One Small Thing is a women’s organisation, with a mission to redesign the justice system for women and their children.

We want a compassionate system that recognises the vicious cycle of trauma and disadvantage at the root of justice involvement and allows people to recover from trauma and thrive. Our core focus is on women and their children because of the additional discrimination and disadvantage they face.

One Small Thing was set up in 2014 by prison philanthropist Lady Edwina Grosvenor in response to unacceptable levels of suicide and self-harm across women’s prisons in England, and feedback from prison staff who wanted to better understand and respond to the underlying trauma behind this.

Though her prison philanthropy work, Edwina met Dr Stephanie Covington who was leading the implementation of trauma-informed approaches across women’s prisons in the US. She visited and saw first-hand in Californian prisons that staff and residents were learning to create a culture that was safer for everyone and more humane. And importantly, evaluations of this work were proving that incidences of mental health crisis for women were significantly reduced. 

Having witnessed the success of this work in huge capacity women’s prisons in the US, Edwina set out to fund and organise the roll out of the Becoming Trauma Informed programme across the much smaller women’s prison estate in England and Wales.  One Small Thing was formed to deliver this, initially managed as an initiative under the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies before becoming an independent charity in 2018 with Dr Covington frequently coming to the UK to train the prison estate. The Becoming Trauma Informed programme is now well established across prisons in the UK with thousands of staff trained and residents participating in the peer led trauma interventions.

The approach empowers staff to know that when they only have a few minutes with a person, they can still make a difference. Our name reflects the value of those small things – empathy, compassion, respect – and their combined power to make a big difference to the individual - and to society as a whole.

We believe that knowledge about trauma is transformative, it changes how you see yourself and those you support. It changes the question from what’s wrong with you to what has happened to you? This change in perspective changes the behaviour of individual practitioners which supports changes in the culture of organisations. This helps everyone to feel safer, creating relationships in which recovery from trauma is possible.

However, we know redesigning the justice system is not only about making existing prisons less likely to traumatise women.  It means funding community alternatives, reducing women’s imprisonment, and giving far greater consideration to the wider impact on communities when women, including those with children, are sent to prison. Our vision can only be achieved by affecting change in all settings and systems that inevitably impact on women and children’s lives, for example housing, health and social care, policing and the wider prison estate.

The work of One Small Thing has expanded to facilitate trauma-informed and gender-responsive programmes for criminal justice and community sector organisations. This includes training, trauma-informed regional networks for professionals and a national quality mark to benchmark and recognise good practice in trauma-informed working. We build capacity across these settings and create broader systems change, which ultimately helps us achieve our goal of a more compassionate system for women and their children.

In 2019, after years of planning and consultation, we began working with women to design and build a pioneering residential community for women and their children affected by the justice system in Hampshire called Hope Street. Hope Street aims to reduce the number of women unnecessarily going to prison, prevent maternal separation and intergenerational trauma, and support women and children to lead happier lives free from the impact of crime. Hope Street opened in June 2023 and we are actively collating and sharing our learning as a blueprint for national systems change.

At One Small Thing our work now continues to educate about the impact of trauma, influence for a more compassionate approach and redesign the justice system for women and their children.