Head of Public Affairs and Communications

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. Many organisations have this calling. Our unique role is to identify what works best and to spread the good news. We won’t be able to do this unless we build excellent relationships across government and communicate expertly. The Head of Public Affairs and Comms makes sure we do just that. Key responsibilities All of your responsibilities boil down to this, you ensure that we: Build and maintain great relationships with some of the most influential people in government. Our work will identify the best ways to reduce knife crime. This won’t matter though if we have no influence on government policy. Your main job is to ensure we build relationships of trust with senior civil servants, ministers and advisers. Understand the interests and concerns of different parts of government. If we are to have influence, we must understand how different parts of government think and what matters to them. So many different departments affect young people’s lives including, though not limited to, the DfE, DCMS and the Home Office. You make sure that we understand their interests and concerns better than anyone. Ensure that YEF is highly effective at communicating: Together with the Senior Communications Manager, who you will manage, you will ensure that the YEF builds significant profile based on trust and credibility as a lead voice on youth violence. You will ensure that we are regularly and meaningfully in the public eye and that our work is highly visible to people we need to influence. Lead well: As a senior member of the team you will play a key role in setting the tone of the organisation. You will bring kindness, a bias to action, wise judgement, a positive supportive attitude, a sense of humility, humour and a desire to make the world a better place than you found it. Person specification You understand how government works – as in really understand: You understand the nuance of how decisions are made within government. You understand that there is no such thing as ‘the department’s position’ (instead there are different views competing) and that while some decisions are very rational, some are more about personalities and politics. You find the process of how decisions get made within government departments, and with Number 10 and the Treasury, fascinating. In an ideal world you will have worked inside government and seen important decisions get made, but this is not an essential requirement. You understand how political parties and MPs work: You understand how the political side of decision-making works. You have an up to date understanding of the ups and downs of individuals and ideas within the two main parties. This may mean that you are (or have been) a member of a political party but you won’t be tribal. Ideally you have some existing connections with people working within the present administration. You win people over. People tend to warm to you and respect you. You easily build good relationships with both very senior and very junior people. You can be at ease talking to a senior politician or a 15 year old. You are a team player: You work brilliantly in a team. You are not motivated by being the individual winner. You want the team as a whole to succeed. You enjoy coaching other people so that they perform excellently in a meeting. You are not possessive of your contacts. You don’t care who gets the credit as long as things get done. You are fantastic at spotting how to get something done in Whitehall or Westminster: You are really good at thinking about how to make change happen. To some, Westminster and Whitehall can seem like a blob but you are brilliant at spotting how to make change happen there. You can think through the intricacies of who to get onside, who to get advice from, who to persuade and how to get the job done. You have a track record of doing this. You are interested in designing a strategy to ‘make the weather’ not in passively responding to it : You are a strategic thinker. You love the idea of (for example) being given a blank piece of paper and asked to put together a three year plan for changing the way government thinks about investing in social care or training teachers. This prospect motivates you rather than overwhelms you; in fact, you have worked like this before. Some people prefer reactive jobs where they respond to events at pace - this is not that job. You are interested in doing a job that is about leading on making a long-term difference rather than being overwhelmed by hundreds of daily decisions made at pace. You think fast: You very quickly get your head around ideas. You have an track record that shows how quickly you think. You wear this lightly though. It is important to you to be humble. You acknowledge how much you don't know as well as how much you do. You have experience leading on communications and talking to journalists: You are comfortable being responsible for our communications. You have experience in putting together a communications plan and talking to journalists to pitch a story. You understand how to get a story to ‘cut through’. You write really well and care about good writing. If you are interested To make an application please send a CV and cover letter to us 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.