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Involvement Officer

Employer
Shelter
Location
Sheffield, South Yorkshire
Salary
£22,562 pa (pro rata, 22.5 hrs pw) + excellent benefits
Closing date
15 Sep 2019

Job Details

We're looking for a results-driven individual with experience of delivering service user involvement or volunteering projects, to join us as an Involvement Officer and provide vital support to our services staff.

A home is a fundamental human need, as essential as education or healthcare. Yet millions of people across Britain struggle on a daily basis with homelessness, bad housing conditions, soaring rents, discrimination and the threat of eviction. So, we are striving for change - with individuals, in communities, across society - and leading the way to a safe home. We need ambitious, best-in-class individuals who are passionate about our cause to join us at this exciting time. This is your chance to play a part in the fundamental change we are striving to achieve.

Our Involvement Team helps Shelter staff to deliver volunteering and Service User Involvement (SUI) programmes in their area. SUI activities involve working alongside our clients and people affected by housing and homelessness issues, to influence and inform our work and make improvements to the services we provide. The team's aim is to ensure that clear pathways and frameworks are in place for all volunteering and involvement activities at Shelter, ensuring that volunteers and service users can be fully engaged and supported to get involved in our work. You'll play a big part in making sure that happens.

About the Role
Your challenge? To help staff in your region to deliver a consistent, quality Involvement programme. That involves providing guidance, coaching and support to staff, as well as sharing best practice and ensuring that organisational policies and procedures are followed. Identifying and promoting volunteer opportunities within Shelter by contributing to recruitment campaigns will be important too. And, when it comes to assessing the learning and development needs of people involved in our work, as well as delivering Involvement inductions, again, we'll count on you. Supporting corporate and cultural change, establishing links with key internal teams and external bodies, managing risk and helping to evaluate our involvement programmes - all are aspects of this challenging role.

About you
We’re looking for someone with a track record of delivering service user involvement or volunteering projects and providing support and development to service users, volunteers and colleagues. With the ability to encourage, promote and support the involvement of volunteers or service users in the design and delivery of services. What's more, you're used to building relationships with a variety of external agencies and professionals and adept at presenting information and writing reports. Proficiency using office IT systems to record and analyse data is also essential, as is a proactive, customer-focused approach. We’d like to encourage people who have lived experience of housing issues and/or homelessness and an interest in how these issues can affect people's lives.

Benefits
We offer a wide range of benefits, including 30 days of annual leave (pro rata), enhanced family friendly policies, pension and interest free travel loans. Our employees also have access to a tenancy deposit loan, cycle to work scheme and an employee assistance programme.

Shelter helps millions of people every year struggling with bad housing or homelessness through our advice, support and legal services. And we campaign to make sure that, one day, no one will have to turn to us for help. We're here so no one has to fight bad housing or homelessness on their own.

To find out more about the role and the benefits of working for Shelter please visit our website. Apply to be part of our team and be the change you want to see in society.

Safeguarding is everyone's business. Shelter is committed to protecting the health, wellbeing and human rights of those we support, and enabling them to live free from harm, abuse and neglect. All our staff will be expected to observe professional standards of behaviour and conduct their work in line with our Safeguarding Policies.

At Shelter, we welcome and encourage applications from everyone regardless of age, disability, gender, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation. We are facing diverse problems, so need diverse people to tackle them.

Shelter does not accept unsolicited CVs from external recruitment agencies nor accept the fees associated with them.

Company

The housing crisis is now a national emergency.

Shelter was founded 52 years ago, not by the wealthy or powerful, but as a community organisation whose purpose was to change society. That means we’re needed more now than at any time in our history: for millions of our fellow citizens the fundamental human need for a safe home is ignored.

Forget finding who’s to blame for this. Shelter is here to do far more than just point out what’s gone wrong. We are here to put it right, and that’s why our aim is for this strategy to be nothing less than a turning point for both Shelter and our country.

Without a home, no one can achieve their full potential. With millions whose right to a home is under threat, neither can the country. We believe that because the need for a home is so all-consuming, a home is a basic moral right, and everything we will do from now will be done to defend that right.

We’ve all talked so much about the ‘housing crisis’ that we’ve stopped believing it can be solved. The phrase has become like wallpaper. But this is a national emergency, and one that demands fearless, ambitious action.

In developing this strategy, it’s been vital to start with our own people: those who rely on our services, our volunteers, our employees. We aim to rebuild a movement, stronger than ever, and a movement must start with a simple idea that unites everyone within Shelter, our best advocates. Change starts here, in our work with individuals, spreading through communities, and across society.

We identify in this strategy six million households whose right to a home is either denied or under threat at this very moment. Soaring rents that squeeze out food and clothing, being thrown out of your home through no fault of your own, simply being too poor to afford a home: the terror of homelessness is everywhere.

Many are living in grossly unfit and unsafe conditions, adults and children whose lives are blighted by fear and despair. Discrimination is rampant in private renting and we have lost sight of the simple fact that we need a home just as much as we need healthcare and education. We are building the fewest social homes in 70 years, at a time when more and more people desperately need them.

In Shelter’s services, our people work tirelessly to alleviate the sheer destitution they see day in and day out. We will be a rock in the storm every day for those who need us. But our aim is bigger – to cut this suffering off at source – and we acknowledge in this strategy that we can’t do it overnight, neither can we do it alone.

For the first time, Shelter is committing in this strategy to ten-year goals as well as three-year goals so we can be confident of building to the necessary changes over the next decade. And at the same time we commit in this strategy to building the movement of people who will make this change possible.

We plan in the next three years to have 500,000 supporters join us in our mission to respond to this emergency, through campaigning, volunteering and donating. It is people that can power the change we seek.

This national emergency has been decades in the making. Now is the moment to act together with one purpose. In the community, our hubs and shops will be magnets for everyone with a role in ending the national emergency. Nationally, we will work with everyone who sees the desperate need for change: no one group or party is to blame for the emergency, and no one group or party can end it either.

Shelter: it’s a fundamental need and a basic moral right. Please join us to defend it.

Polly Neate, Chief Executive

Helen Baker, Chair

Company info
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