“I want to empower people to improve their own lives, to help them help themselves.”

That is Gill Smallwood speaking. She is the Chief Executive of Fortalice – Bolton’s refuge for women, children and young people escaping domestic abuse and its separate outreach support centre where training and a crisis service are based.

Without deliberately planning her career moves to this point, Gill has equipped herself to head a modern, reactive service that cares, loves and nurtures but also that educates and offers skills for the future.

Gill was born in Bolton but lived in Bury where she went to Bury Church School. She was good at the sciences and English at school but had no burning ambitions. As a result, at 16 she found herself guided into hairdressing.

“I suppose I knew it wasn’t for me long-term but it took me until I was 26, bringing up my son and living in Bolton, that I realised I wanted to return to education and that I was genuinely interested in it,” she stated.

Operating her freelance hairdressing business by day and studying by night, she spent two years taking her education degree. She then taught in Further Education at Bolton College and moved on to teacher education, continuing her own studies in psychology and counselling. “I was an academic and I loved it,” she asserted.

Interestingly, she chose Fortalice for her psychology placement “and I learned an amazing amount here. The stories were humbling,” she said.

Gill continued her Bolton College career through various departments, becoming an advanced practitioner and a teacher educator training students to become teachers.

She stayed in education for 28 years but her career path changed on the awful day one of her students, who had been in an abusive relationship with her boyfriend, was murdered by him.

“It was terrible, shocking” she said. But, for Gill, it also crystallised the feelings that she wanted to make a difference and take up a new challenge.

She had already joined the board of Fortalice and when the job came up as Director of Services, as it then was, she stepped down from the board and applied for it successfully. That was in 2011 “and in the first week we faced huge funding cuts,” she recalled.

That baptism of fire began to equip her, not just for dealing with the financial pressures of a service at the sharp end of social care, but also for re-shaping an existing organisation to help it respond to how life was changing.

“And we have had a lot of growth and development since,” stated Gill. “We had to change to survive.”

That change has involved finding alternative sources of funding, which Gill herself has taken on. It has involved filling the need for further services for residents coping with mental health and other problems. It has included dealing with the toll that domestic abuse has taken on family relationships and especially on the children and their need for counselling.

It has also involved finding funding for, and helping create, the Healthy Relationships’ programme that is rolled out in local primary and secondary schools to aid children and young people to better relationships to help combat future domestic abuse.

Gill’s background and contacts have enabled Fortalice to create useful partnerships with outside organisations – “and we are collaborating much better now with the police, for example. There is a greater understanding of what we do and what is needed.”

Gill also serves on a variety of other organisations which improve and co-ordinate services including 1Point, Bolton Together and Fresh as a Daisy. She is also a Governor for Walmsley School.

She heads a staff of 43 at the refuge and the outreach support centre and helps deal with a variety of problems and situations on a daily basis. She does, however, love the challenge of the job – and the difference it makes.

She can still be shocked by abusive relationships, by the control that prevents women from breastfeeding their own children, or having their hair cut for years or having any contact with friends and family.

“But you see our families having fun together on an outing, probably for the first time ever,” said Gill, “or them leaving the refuge, able to live their own lives and, you know, it’s a great feeling.”

Caption: EMPOWERING PEOPLE – Fortalice Chief Executive Gill Smallwood