Conflict And Humanitarian Advocacy Advisor Jobs
Closing Date: 21 April 2024
Ref 6693
Save the Children UK has an exciting opportunity for a Senior Politics and Public Affairs Advisor.
Please note: This role will require up to 3 days a week in the office/London for external meetings.
About Us
Save the Children UK believes every child deserves a future. In the UK and around the world, we work every day to give children a healthy start in life, the opportunity to learn and protection from harm. When crisis strikes, and children are most vulnerable, we are always among the first to respond and the last to leave. We ensure children's unique needs are met and their voices are heard. We deliver lasting results for millions of children, including those hardest to reach.
About the role
As Senior Politics and Public Affairs Advisor you will Lead our parliamentary engagement across the work we do delivering high-impact change strategies whilst building and holding relationships with parliament. You will lead our government relations and public affairs work in helping to reduce child poverty and improve childcare. Working closely with colleagues in media to influence and government and address these issues.
In this role, you will:
- Lead political influencing and develop advocacy strategies for Save the Children's work.
- Identify lobbying opportunities and enable colleagues to exploit them fully using powerful evidence, trusted relationships, and innovative and creative tactics that help Save the Children stand out in a crowded arena.
- Provide strategic political insight and ensure systematic monitoring, analysis and dissemination of political intelligence.
- Represent SCUK externally, actively networking and building constructive relationships with parliamentarians, government/opposition, advisers, officials, trade unions, political parties, think tanks, NGOs and media to support SCUK's influencing and profile building.
- Manage SCUK's contact with ministers, and senior civil servants; identifying and creating opportunities to influence processes through lobbying, consultations, inquiries, bills and other mechanisms.
- Work with team members to ensure that campaigning and advocacy is integrated and consistent, and that campaigning outputs are designed to create policy change.
About you
To be successful, it is important that you have:
- Significant operational experience of structures, processes and trends in the UK political system.
- Knowledge of international development, conflict and humanitarian issues and / or social policy particularly child poverty
- Track record of building and maintaining relationships which lead to policy impact, either in Parliament, with Government or soft power institutions.
- Proven ability to think and plan strategically, with a track record of achieving political change
- Demonstrable understanding of, and experience in managing, political risk and an understanding of the operating environment for charities, particularly around challenges to charity campaigns and advocacy.
- Ability to effectively build, manage and work within networks and coalitions for lobbying and advocacy purposes.
- Commitment to Save the Children's vision, mission and values.
What we offer you:
Working for a charity provides one of the best benefits there is – a sense of purpose and reward for helping others. However, we understand the importance of giving back to our employees to ensure a happy and healthy working environment and work/life balance.
- We focus on flexibility, inclusion, collaboration, health and wellbeing both in and outside of work.
- We provide a wide range of benefits which will reward your hard work, motivate you, and inspire you to work to improve the lives of children every day.
Please note: To avoid disappointment, you are advised to submit your application as soon as possible as we reserve the right to close the vacancy early if a high volume of applications are received. This is to ensure that we can manage application levels whilst maintaining a positive candidate experience. Unfortunately once a vacancy has closed, we are unable to consider further applications.
Ways of Working:
The majority of our roles can be performed remotely in the UK, but there are likely to be times when you will be required to come to your contracted office (up to 2-4 days per month or 6-8 days per quarter). This will be agreed with your Line Manager and team and is intended to be time spent on collaborating with colleagues and relationship building.
Please note: travel costs to your contracted office will be at your own expense.
Flexible Working - We are happy to discuss flexible working options at interview.
Comitment to Diversity & Inclusion:
Save the Children UK believes in a world that is fair, inclusive and equitable where all children have the opportunity to change their world. We apply this to our workforce and we are committed to developing and supporting a diverse, equitable, and inclusive organisation where all employees have a sense of belonging and feel that they can be "Free to Be Me". We are not looking for just one type of person - we want to recruit people who can add fresh perspectives, innovative ideas or challenge that disrupts the risk of group think.
We are especially interested in people whose childhood experiences - of life on a low income, of migration, of being in a racialised community, of the care system, of being LGBT+ or in an LGBT+ family or living with (or with someone with) a disability - help us to see things we might otherwise miss. Whatever your story is we want to hear it because we know that different voices, ideas, perspectives and knowledge, working together will enable us to better the lives of children around the world. This is the reason why we are all here.
Previous Applicants need not apply.
Role Purpose
To fulfil its Programme Strategy 2022-2027, ShelterBox’s programming will be guided by two Shelter Technical leads, one with a greater focus on emergency response and one with a greater focus on transitional and durable shelters and WASH. The two positions - working in close coordination and collaboration - will collaborate with the Programme Quality and Programme Delivery teams, to maximise the quality of ShelterBox’s programming in alignment with our renewed mission, vision, and strategy, under the leadership of the Head of Programme Quality.
Duties will include but not be limited to:
- Provide technical input into shelter and WASH project design and development, ensuring that shelter technical standards are documented in project sheltering strategies and tools, and that these standards are adhered to throughout the project cycle.
- Continually assess ShelterBox’s technical strengths and areas for improvement, identify approaches to addressing areas for improvement and work with relevant colleagues to put these into action.
- Provide technical advice and assistance to needs assessment, project design and delivery, including through participating in project design, reviewing concept notes/proposals and presence in-country where this is necessary to support the quality of high priority activities.
- Support partners technical shelter knowledge and capacity development, ensuring that their activities are aligned with organisational and global humanitarian standards.
- Ensure that shelter projects consider priority cross-cutting issues such as, environment, housing land and property rights, protection, gender and inclusion, and safety; and that site activities comply with appropriate local, national, and international standards and regulations.
- Support to market assessments to identify existing capacities and resources that can be leveraged to support self-recovery in shelter programming.
- Provide technical support and advice to emergency preparedness planning.
- Work with Heads of Department in International Programmes to identify technical capacity building/training needs of programme staff and ShelterBox Response Team volunteers, and work with the Learning & Development team to develop approaches to meeting these needs.
- Support the Programme Delivery team (Emergencies and Regional Programmes) to assess technical capacity of partners. Develop and deliver and/or facilitate access to shelter and WASH technical capacity building opportunities for our partners as appropriate and work with the Learning & Development team to develop approaches to meeting training needs.
- Represent ShelterBox in the Global Shelter Cluster and other relevant global shelter technical fora, networks, and coordination mechanisms. Facilitate participation of other representatives of ShelterBox in technical/sector fora as appropriate.
- Build and maintain effective working relationships with technical shelter leads in peer organisations.
- Act as technical focal point for existing strategic global/regional partnerships and support the Director and Deputy Director of International Programmes and the Partnerships Manager to build and maintain new strategic relationships with other shelter actors (not including Rotary).
- Engage with sector networks and resources to maintain relationships and awareness of sector trends, learning and recommended practice. Identify potential opportunities and significant improvements in the way we work.
- Proactively analyse and make recommendations on how emerging global and sector trends, developments and research might potentially affect current policy and practices.
- Support development of a Research Strategy and ensure accompanying work plans to make the most of opportunity for improvement, innovation, and development. Include consideration of aid items, approaches, and agreed organisational learnings.
- Build links and collaborate with relevant sector organisations, communities of practice and academic institutions to build strategically appropriate research agenda.
- Engage professional partners (organisations, individuals, and communities of practice) to both obtain and cascade learning opportunities.
- Promote and actively support an organisational learning culture. Communicate knowledge and learning related to product, process, and approach. Work with the Impact & Accountability Lead to ensure that ShelterBox has robust systems in place for technical knowledge management and knowledge sharing. Ensure relevant programme and wider staff are aware of key sector trends and recommended practice as appropriate.
- Work in collaboration with the Sustainability Manager to ensure that project design and implementation considers sustainability, including, but not limited to, utilising local resources where this makes sense and in reducing plastic and emissions in our programming.
- Work in collaboration with Sustainability Manager and Supply Chain to research, test, develop and implement more sustainable alternatives to our shelter offering.
- Support the development of a research strategy and ensure accompanying work plans to make the most of opportunity for improvement, innovation, and development. Include consideration of aid items, approaches, and agreed organisational learnings.
- Accurately and accessibly present ideas, findings, recommendations, and changes as appropriate to the audience to support organisational awareness, decision making, sector voice, and income generation.
- Work away from home, this may be UK or overseas training or deployment to disaster affected areas. Whilst you are unlikely to respond for more than six weeks at any one time, you may be required to deploy for up to 40% of your time in any calendar year.
Other responsibilities
- Any other duties as required which are deemed appropriate to the level and grade of the post.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.