Engagement And Culture Specialist Volunteer Roles in Edinburgh

We are seeking to diversify our board! We are looking for one Trustee and one Chair.  Do you have a passion for sex workers’ rights and safety? Do you want to be part of a charity with vital real-world impact? Do you have the time and skills to guide NUM’s board and staff towards its mission? Then we’d love to hear from you.

We are especially keen to receive applications from people of colour, others with marginalised identities and sex work experience. If you’d like to speak with someone in advance of applying, please contact the current chair, Siân Prime, at sian[at]uglymugs[dot]org with Chair Enquiry in the subject line.

About NUM:

National Ugly Mugs (NUM) is an award-winning charity with a mission to ‘end all forms of violence against sex workers.’ NUM provides a mechanism for sex industry workers to report crimes and harm they experience and share this information within their communities to warn others of potentially dangerous individuals and situations.

We have a dedicated casework team of industry experts who support sex workers to further access criminal justice remedies and other services as determined by victims/survivors to cope and recover from crimes they experience in the ways they choose. We also host a range of other projects in racial justice, mental health, drop-in support (Scotland), and vocational exploration.

Our main aims are to: 

• Increase sex worker safety and prevent crime and harms against this diverse population of adults.

• Support sex workers in generating knowledge and sharing their experiences in ways that advance the well-being of their communities, increase the social inclusion of sex workers and an end discrimination, criminalisation, and violence.

• Provide survivor-centred, trauma-informed support services.

• Facilitate sex workers in safely accessing the public services of their choosing and in educating communities of stakeholders to ensure that:

• sex workers are the ones characterising their work and defining their circumstances, needs and priorities.

• services are informed about the needs and priorities of sex workers in order to promote non-judgemental treatment and respectful engagement.

• all sex workers, irrespective of class, race, gender, sexuality, ability, status in the country and type of sex work, receive consistent, protective responses from police when they access them for help.

• sex workers inform justice, victim support, anti-violence and inclusion health initiatives in ways that improve their wellbeing and increase their engagement in civil society.

We serve sex workers of all genders, ages, abilities, cultures and modes of work and offer a digital reporting and alerting mechanism to warn these communities about dangerous individuals who may target them. We provide individualised specialist support from experiential support staff and others trained as Independent Sexual Violence Advisors (ISVA) who ensure sex workers have the information and resources needed to make important choices about their lives.

Key facts

• NUM has 17 members of staff, and 8 board members

• In 2022:

  • NUM had over 9000 members, 80% of whom were sex workers

  • Our Case Work Team provided direct support to over 737 sex workers 

  • 519 reports of harm perpetrated against sex workers were submitted to NUM, and we sent out over 760,000 alerts to sex workers to prevent further violence 

Please read our role description attached to find out more about who we’re looking for.