Director of Change, Partnerships and Impact

The Youth Endowment Fund is a bold new attempt to put early intervention at the heart of efforts to tackle youth offending. Over the last few years, evidence suggests that growing numbers of children and young people have been affected by violent crime. More children have been found carrying knives and a growing number have been recorded as victims. We believe that each individual child is an important member of our community and society has a duty to protect them. The Youth Endowment Fund is a charity with a £200m endowment and a mission that matters. Founded by youth charity Impetus and its partners the Early Intervention Foundation and the Social Investment Business, we exist to prevent children and young people from getting caught up in violent crime. To succeed we must do two things. The first task is: ‘Find what works’. This isn’t your job. We have a team of expert grant makers and researchers funding and evaluating programmes to find out what works. We need you to lead the second task is: ‘Grow what works using every possible lever’. Once we work out what works we need you to make sure great things grow. This means building coalitions who will want great things to grow, changing practice in organisations and agencies that work with vulnerable children, helping great charities to grow through providing support and advice, pushing for changes in regulations, funding rules and guidance, building and maintaining relationships, ensuring the use of money to invest to support great projects. Overseeing all of this is your job. To put it another way, your job is to make sure that we make a real difference. Sometimes we will find an amazing charity delivering a great programme and your job will be to ensure it is supported to grow. Sometimes we will find a great practice that would make a huge difference if the main agencies responsible for vulnerable children took it on board – your job will be to build the coalitions and communications to make that happen. Without you, we work out what works but nothing changes and we don’t succeed. With you in place, we believe we can make a lasting difference. Key responsibilities Most fundamentally, you lead on ensuring that the Youth Endowment Fund successfully makes change happen. Working with your team, you do this by: Building fantastic external relationships. This includes: Coalition building: If we are to have a chance at changing practices in sectors including education, social care and policing, we will need to build deep and trusting relationships with organisations at the heart of these worlds. Every time we run a funding round we will want to build a coalition of engaged supporters who care about our funding round area of focus. It will be your team’s job to build and strengthen these relationships. Funding partnerships: We have a goal of raising an additional £100m. We will achieve most of this by building great funding partnerships with other funders. Our first partnership is with Comic Relief. It is your job to build future funding partnerships. Overseeing our change process: For every grant round we run a change process made up of a number of stages. It is your job to ensure this process is followed and that all parts of the organisation play their part: Selecting an area of focus for funding, e.g., family interventions, exclusions or mentoring. Preparing for a funding round, which includes building coalitions, finding our funding partner(s), engaging young people, summarising the existing evidence, mapping power and influence. Delivering the grant round, which includes selecting high quality applications, supporting and improving them and selecting the best. Evaluating the outcomes, which includes finding what works and why it works. Delivering impact, which includes scaling up great charities, spreading great practice and pushing for system changes. Identifying and delivering the best way to achieve change: In each funding round it is your job to ensure we find the best way to achieve change. You decide whether there are specific charities we should help to scale, particular practices we should look to spread or systems that we should look to change. In all of this you will be looking to work with the coalitions that you have built. Capacity building: Across the change process you will also lead on ensuring that we deliver capacity building when needed. This might include ensuring that charities who apply for funding have support - if needed - to clarify their theory of change, helping charities to prepare for evaluation rounds and helping to scale and strengthen charities which have great practice. Depending on your background and experience, you will take the lead responsibility for all matters of external affairs including public affairs, branding, media, communications and crisis communications. As a senior leader in the organisation you also: Build and lead your team, providing clear direction, agility, high-quality outputs and a culture where it is natural to perform well and support colleagues brilliantly. Lead the organisation as a core member of the Leadership Team, setting the strategy, delivering results and building and modelling the culture that we need to succeed. About You You are this sort of person: You make change happen. You have experience of leading people and teams in delivering results. You especially excel in situations of ambiguity where there are not clear rules to follow, previous patterns to copy or clear evidence of what will work. You win people over. People tend to warm to you and respect you. You have built good relationships with very senior people and with very junior people. You are comfortable talking to a Secretary of State, a youth worker, a company CEO, a teacher and a 15 year old student. Listening to people from all backgrounds matters to you. You are comfortable asking for funding, support and partnerships. You learn fast but remain humble. You are very quick at getting your head around things. You like learning. You are very good at synthesising information. You know how much you don't know. You know that you can learn more. You know that it's easy to assume you know when you don't. You care more that good things happen than who gets the credit. You are a great and supportive team player. You are fascinated and thoughtful on how change happens. You have the cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence and experience to find the ways to make change happen when there are multiple stakeholders. You understand why people find change difficult. You come alive talking about how people make decisions and why they do the things they do. You are interested in behavioural change. You are an excellent strategic thinker. People say that you are good at seeing the big picture. You have experience of wrestling into place a strategy for a project or organisation. You are good at thinking logically but you are also creative. You have ideas but are happy rejecting a lot of them. You like seeing things from different points of view. You don't want your days to pass without making a difference. You want to play a significant part in reducing the level of youth violence. You understand young people. You understand what the lives of vulnerable young people can be like and you understand some of the organisations that work with them, ideally through first hand experience. You have a good understanding of how the youth sector, public sector and schools operate. You must have this sort of experience You have … Built Partnerships or Coalitions: You have significant experience in building partnerships or coalitions. You can show how these have have been effective in delivering change. Developed and Delivered Strategy: You have significant experience of developing and delivering a strategy from scratch. Scaled an Initiative: You have experience of either scaling an initiative or supporting an initiative to get to scale. This could be a charity or a project. You have learnt from this experience what it takes to make something operate at a larger scale. Significantly Fundraised: You have significant experience of developing successful financial partnerships with other funders and ideally also with corporations, foundations and individuals that have led to significant support, both cash and in kind. Built and led a team and fantastic culture: You have experience of building and leading a team and being very proactive in building open, supportive, brilliant team culture. You might have this sort of experience It’s not necessary but it would be an extra bonus if you have: Experience working with policymakers, commissioners and/or practitioners of services or programmes for young people Experience of managing public affairs and external communications teams If you are interested To make an application please send us a CV and cover letter by 9am Monday 20 April 2020. As part of our commitment to flexible working we will consider a range of options for the successful applicant. All options can be discussed at interview stage. Your personal data will be shared for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. This includes our HR team, interviewers (who may include other partners in the project and independent advisors), relevant team managers and our IT service provider if access to the data is necessary for performance of their roles. We do not share your data with other third parties, unless your application for employment is successful and we make you an offer of employment. We will then share your data with former employers to obtain references for you. We do not transfer your data outside the European Economic Area. The people we are looking for do not discriminate and we believe in being inclusive and giving everyone an equal chance to succeed. Applications are welcome from all regardless of age, sex, gender identity, disability, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, race, sexual orientation, transgender status or social economic background.