Lady Edwina Grosvenor


Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor is an English philanthropist and prison reformer. She is a founder and a trustee of the charity The Clink, and founder of the charity One Small Thing. She is the sister of Hugh Grosvenor, 7th Duke of Westminster; the Duke and his family are estimated to be worth £10.1 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List in May 2019.

Early life and education

Lady Edwina Louise Grosvenor was born at Eaton Hall, Cheshire on 4 November 1981. She is the daughter of the 6th Duke of Westminster and Natalia Phillips. Through her mother, she is descended from the Romanov imperial family of Russia and the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, as well as from the latter's great-grandfather - African tribal chief turned Russian nobleman Abram Petrovich Hannibal. Grosvenor's godmother was Diana, Princess of Wales. She went to a co-educational school in the Wirral. At the age of 12 she was taken to a Liverpool rehabilitation centre, where she was introduced to heroin addicts and became interested in helping society's unseen people. She spent her gap year working in a prison in Kathmandu before studying criminology at Northumbria University. In Nepal she worked to help innocent children get out of prison. She studied criminal behaviour at Edith Cowan University. In 2007 she became a research assistant for the Bishop of Liverpool.

Career

Grosvenor commissioned research by the Corston Coalition into the needs of women offenders. She spent a year as a support worker for the HM Prison Styal, and sits on the Advisory Board for Female Offenders. In 2009 Grosvenor was a founder of The Clink, a British charity that identifies the training and support needed for prisoners to find jobs following release. The Clink restaurant, a fine-dining training restaurant, opened in HM Prison High Down in 2009. She became a trustee of the charity in 2011, and today serves as a Clink ambassador. She presented the BBC Radio 4 Charity Appeal for the Prisoners' Advice Service in 2014.
Grosvenor founded One Small Thing, a charity that seeks to understand the trauma within the prison system and to raise awareness of how compassion and respect can prevent women from reoffending. One Small Things trains prison staff about trauma, helps them change their behaviour to protect women inmates, and develops trauma services within prisons. In 2017 One Small Thing collaborated with the Rumi Foundation to research women's prisons around the country. Grosvenor is a trustee of the Centre for Mental Health, and has established trauma informed mental health workshops in women's prisons. One Small Thing were awarded the Howard League for Penal Reform Criminal Justice Champion award in 2018.
In July 2018 Grosvenor was awarded an honorary fellowship of Liverpool John Moores University for her contribution to public life. Grosvenor hosts the podcast Justice, where she discusses the environment of UK prisons.

Personal life

Grosvenor married British television presenter Dan Snow on 27 November 2010 at Bishop's Lodge in Woolton, Liverpool in an Anglican ceremony performed by James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool. They have three children.