The Smiths Foundation

The Smiths Foundation intensifies the social impact of our charitable giving, supporting projects and organisations that align with our purpose to engineer a better future.

The Foundation focuses on three impact pillars:

1. Expanding access to quality STEM education and skills for underrepresented groups
2. Strengthening safety and connectedness through engineering and technology-led solutions
3. Advancing environmental sustainability through engineering, technology and biodiversity restoration

To mark our 175th anniversary we expanded the Foundation’s programme to support three strategic funding streams: scholarships and education, colleague-nominated charities, and biodiversity and environment. And we increased the Foundation’s invested fund to c.£25m to create a strong platform for long-term impact aligned with our strategy.

Find out more in the video featuring our Foundation Chairman, Ben Macdonald.

Making an impact

The Foundation has awarded c.£3m in grants to 32 different charities across 16 countries since its inception.

We’ve recently formed a scholarship partnership with Aston University, UK to support 45 STEM students a year for three years, with each student offered mentoring from Smiths. Our first Aston cohort is being recruited for the 2026/27 academic year. We are exploring similar partnerships with education providers in the US and Mexico.

We’ve committed £200k annually to charities focused on environmental protection, restoration and biodiversity including World Land Trust (WLT) and Treeapp. For the past two years, we’ve funded the protection and conservation of land equivalent to our global operational footprint +20% through WLT, creating wildlife corridors in Uganda and Kenya. With Treeapp, we’ve planted 15,000 coastal mangroves in a vulnerable region in Brazil and funded a further 17,000 native trees in the UK, together equivalent to reforesting more than 200,000 m2 of land.

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