Animal welfare jobs

Can you make a real impact guiding individuals through their employment journey?

Employment Advisor
Contract type: Permanent
Working hours: Full Time - 37 hours per week
Salary: Circa £26,988 per annum
Location: Carlisle

About Us

Groundwork NE & Cumbria is a long established environmental and community charity with over 30 years of experience creating greener, healthier and more resilient places across the region. Our mission centres on Creating Better Places, Improving People’s Prospects, and Promoting Greener Living, helping communities thrive no matter the challenges they face.

We deliver hundreds of locally led projects each year, including initiatives that support young people and adults into education, training and employment, helping them overcome barriers, build life skills, and reach their full potential.

About The Role

Join our dynamic Employment Team as a dedicated Employment Advisor, supporting individuals 1:1 on their journey into work, developing action plans, building skills, and driving positive outcomes in a fast-paced, community-focused environment.

Job Purpose

Working as a member of the Employment Team you will engage on a 1:1 basis with our employment programme participants, establishing and maintaining excellent relationships to understand and meet their individual needs. You will develop personal action plans which enable movement of these people towards and into further sustainable employment. You will work in a friendly, busy employment team environment to ensure programme performance targets are consistently achieved to meet requirements of the allocated contract.

We want someone like you with the confidence to positively engage and motivate people from a wide range of backgrounds. In your role you will work closely with the local community and employers, supporting referrals onto the programme and identifying employment opportunities. You will enable participants to develop valuable work based skills and gain knowledge. Your role will require you to be supportive and understanding, be able to deal with any issues that may arise confidently. You will have strong interpersonal skills and be able to adapt them pending on what you are dealing with, communicating at different levels as key in this role.

Closing Date: Tuesday 30th June 2026.
Please note, should we receive a high volume of applications, we may look to close the role early, therefore we recommend an early application.

Interested?

If you would like to find out more, please click the Apply button. You will be directed to our website to complete your application for this position.

This role is subject to an Enhanced Disclosure endorsed by the Disclosure and Barring Service

We want you to be yourself at Groundwork and we value everything that makes you unique. We recognise and celebrate your difference and together we make Groundwork a special and great place to work. As a Disability Confident employer we offer a guaranteed interview to applicants with a disability who meet the essential criteria for the role.

At Groundwork we ensure that we provide a safe environment for adults, children and young people to take part in any activity or service that we organise. We are committed to creating a culture that promotes safeguarding and the welfare of all children, young people and adults at risk. Our safer recruitment practices support this by ensuring that there is a consistent and comprehensive process of obtaining, collating, analysing and evaluating information from and about candidates to ensure that all the people we appoint are suitable to work with our children, young people and adults

This role is not eligible for UK Visa Sponsorship – the successful applicant will need to have a pre-existing Right to Work in the UK in order to be offered an employment contract.

No agencies please.

Community Garden Co-ordinator.

Salary: £25,000 Hours of Work: 35 per week

This post is offered until June 30th 2028 in the first instance.

Funded by the National Lottery Reaching Communities Fund.

Netherton Feelgood Factory, a community-based healthy living centre, is offering an exciting opportunity to make a real difference to the lives of people and the environment by taking forward the development of the Netherton Community Garden and Green Hub. We are looking for an imaginative and committed person with knowledge of horticulture but also with the people skills to support and help people from the local area.

The Netherton Community Garden started life in 2016 as a vision to develop a piece of waste urban land into a garden that could be enjoyed by the community and that also would produce fresh produce to promote health and awareness of growing skills.

Since then, and thanks latterly to a National Lottery grant, the garden has begun to develop as a Green Community Hub with the aim of enabling local people to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. The garden has a positive impact on the local community by providing a meeting place, a venue for skills training and a place to promote positive mental and physical health.

Groundwork South is seeking a motivated and experienced Senior Project Officer to lead on the delivery of our Climate Action Fund project over the next five years.

Senior Project Officer (Climate Action Fund Training and Development Lead)
Reference: CAF0626
Contract: Fixed term until June 2031
Hours: Full-Time, 37.5 hours each week
Salary: £28,000 - £32,000 per annum
Location: Home-based (with travel across England) – There is a focus on South West England during the pilot phase

About Us

Groundwork South works with communities across the south of England to transform their lives and the places where they live. We have been at the forefront of social and environmental regeneration for over 25 years, and today we have a simple mission: to create better places, improve people’s prospects, and promote greener living and working.

We are passionate about creating a future where every neighbourhood is vibrant and green, every community is strong and able to shape its own destiny, and no-one is held back by their background or circumstances. This vision drives the work that we do. Each year we deliver over 100 innovative projects, tackling the biggest issues facing our communities and creating real and lasting, positive change.

About the Project

Communities Prepared works with volunteers and communities across England to help them build the skills, confidence and knowledge needed to prepare for, respond to and recover from emergencies. This includes supporting communities to plan for climate-related risks such as flooding, storms, heatwaves, and severe weather.

Despite the successes we have had through our programme to date, we are not currently reaching diverse enough audiences and too often there are people missing from the resilience sector. This needs to change. To address this we are now embarking on an exciting new UK-wide partnership programme funded through the National Lottery Community Fund’s Climate Action Fund over the next five years.

The programme responds to growing evidence that climate-related emergencies, including extreme heat, flooding, fire, cold and severe weather, disproportionately impact marginalised communities, while those same communities are often excluded from resilience planning and decision-making.

The programme brings together Equally Ours, Communities Prepared (part of Groundwork South), and the VCS Emergencies Partnership (VCSEP, part of the British Red Cross) to strengthen climate resilience by ensuring that communities experiencing discrimination and disadvantage are at the heart of climate preparedness, response, recovery and policy-making.

Through a rights-based and co-produced approach, the programme seeks to shift climate resilience policy and practice away from models that frame communities as “vulnerable”, and towards approaches grounded in agency, participation, equality and shared responsibility.

Key Responsibilities

As Senior Project Officer, you will:

• Work with the project team to map stakeholders and co-develop a structured engagement plan to recruit and work with marginalised communities.
• Build a collaborative and trusting relationship with the partner organisations and other stakeholders for this project, ensuring this work meets their expectations and complements areas of the work programme led by others.
• Work with project participants and partners to co-design Communities Prepared material and delivery methods that are more accessible and relevant to diverse audiences.
• Lead on the delivery of resilience training and workshop sessions with diverse audiences, both in-person and online.
• Work with project participants and partners to co-design a train the trainer model that will enable diverse audiences to deliver resilience training within their own communities, amplifying reach and impact.
• Work with the core Communities Prepared team to adapt our offer with the long-term goal of the Programme reaching more diverse audiences, especially those seldom heard in this sector.

The role involves regular travel across the UK, with a focus on South West England during the project’s pilot phase.

We are looking for someone with:

• Experience in community engagement or community development.
• Experience delivering training or workshops.
• Strong organisational and project management skills.
• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills, confident to engage people from a range of different backgrounds.
• Experience working with multiple stakeholders or partners.
• Confidence working independently in a remote role.
• An interest in climate change, community resilience and wider community development.
• A willingness to travel across the country.

Closing date for applications: 11.59pm, 30th June 2026
Interview date: 15th July over MS Teams
Interview panel: Representatives from Groundwork South, Equally Ours and VCSEP (tbc)

Interested?

If you would like to find out more, please click the apply button. You will be directed to our website to complete your application for this position.

Groundwork South is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from all members of the community.

No agencies please.

Contract Legal Specialist

Home Based with regular travel to locations across the UK

Up to £50,000 per annum (or pro-rata for 0.8 FTE)
Permanent, Full Time (35 hours per week) (0.8 FTE could be considered).

This role is predominantly home-based with regular travel to locations across the UK. Office facilities are available at our Newark office (Tuesdays to Thursdays) for those within easy travelling distance.

Closing date for applications: 21st June 2026

First interview: 8th & 9th July (Online Interview)

Second interview: TBC (Online Interview)

About Us

The Wildlife Trusts are a grassroots movement of people from a wide range of backgrounds and all walks of life, who believe that we need nature and nature needs us. We have more than 945,000 members, over 33,000 volunteers, 4,100 staff and 600 trustees. There are 46 individual Wildlife Trusts, each of which is a place-based independent charity with its own legal identity, formed by groups of people getting together and working with others to make a positive difference to wildlife and future generations, starting where they live and work.

Every Wildlife Trust is part of The Wildlife Trusts federation and a corporate member of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts, a registered charity in its own right founded in 1912 and one of the founding members of IUCN – the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Taken together this federation of 47 charities is known as The Wildlife Trusts.

The next few years will be critical in determining what kind of world we all live in. We need to urgently reverse the loss of wildlife and put nature into recovery at scale if we are to prevent climate and ecological disaster. We recognise that this will require big, bold changes in the way The Wildlife Trusts work, not least in how we mobilise others and support them to organise within their own communities.

About You

If you are an experienced and self-motivated contracts lawyer ready to apply your commercial and legal expertise with real purpose, we’d love to hear from you. This is a great opportunity to help safeguard the work and future impact of one of the UK’s best-loved conservation charities.

In this newly created role of contracts legal specialist, you’ll lead on all contractual legal matters across The Wildlife Trusts Federation, acting as the first point of contact, providing high quality legal advice for contract-related queries. Reporting to our Legal Director, you’ll build successful working relationships across the organisation supporting colleagues to identify, manage and mitigate legal risk while enabling the Charity’s work to thrive. You’ll play a key role in promoting legal compliance, contributing to the development of policies and guidance, and staying up to date with legislative changes and relevant case law. While your focus will be on contract law, you’ll also bring a broad awareness of related areas such as charity and employment law.

Using your legal expertise and excellent communication skills, you will design, organise and deliver training to colleagues, embedding best practice, building capacity and confidence, improving consistency and ensuring value for money on contracting activities. You’ll be organised, adaptable and comfortable juggling multiple priorities in an ever-changing environment.

As a pragmatic and commercially astute professional, you’ll balance risk awareness with opportunity, using your initiative to take on new challenges and quickly develop knowledge in unfamiliar areas to support the wider work of the legal team.

While there is currently no line management responsibility, our ambition is to grow the legal function over time — creating future opportunities to gain line management experience and play a part in shaping the team.

The Wildlife Trusts value passion, respect, trust, integrity, pragmatic activism and strength in diversity. We are passionate in promoting our aims, and we pride ourselves on being inclusive. We particularly encourage applications from people who are underrepresented within our sector, including people from minority backgrounds and people with disabilities. We are committed to creating a movement that recognises and truly values individual differences and identities.

RSWT take our Safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. Please click here to read our commitment statement. The Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and adults at risk. For applicable roles, applicants must be willing to undergo checks with past employers and Disclosure and Barring Service checks at the eligible level.

RSWT are committed to increasing the diversity of its staff through its Levelling the Field recruitment pledge and, as a Disability Confident employer, we are committed to fostering an inclusive, equitable, and welcoming recruitment experience for all applicants. Applicants with disabilities and from ethnic minority backgrounds, will be considered for the next stage of the selection process should they meet all the minimum criteria for the role outlined in the person specification detailed as essential criteria in the recruitment pack.

As part of our Disability Confident Scheme, RSWT offers an interview to a fair and proportionate number of applicants with disabilities and therefore not all applicants with disabilities would be entitled to an interview as they must still satisfy the minimum requirements for the job. This commitment is designed to help reduce barriers and promote equal opportunity. We actively work to remove barriers throughout the recruitment journey and are dedicated to creating an accessible and supportive recruitment experience by offering reasonable adjustments at every stage of the recruitment process, as well as within the workplace. If you would benefit from any adjustments to support you during your application or interview process, please let us know and we will be pleased to put the appropriate support in place.

At RSWT, we are committed to creating a safe environment where discrimination, bullying, and harassment are not tolerated. We expect everyone to uphold, respect, and support our zero-tolerance policy. Please be aware we may not accept applications if we have reason to believe they have been wholly produced using generative AI tools.

Location: Hybrid / The Grange, Saunderton, Princes Risborough

Hours: 35 hours per week

We are looking to recruit a Senior Trusts and Foundations Officer to join our Trusts and Foundations team and support the delivery of Hearing Dogs for Deaf People’s fundraising strategy. The Trusts and Foundations team is working towards an income target of £1.3m in 2026 to 2027, with planned growth to £2.1m by 2029 to 2030. 

This is an exciting opportunity to develop your fundraising career within a collaborative and ambitious team. You will contribute to securing income from charitable trusts and foundations, building funder relationships, and managing our small trust mailing. 

We are looking for individuals who demonstrate passion for our cause, a keen eye for detail, and the ability to write compellingly about the difference Hearing Dogs makes to the lives of deaf people. You will be confident communicating with a wide variety of people, including funders, volunteers, and senior colleagues, and will bring a proactive and positive approach to everything you do.

Benefits

• Employee Assistance Programme
• Death in Service Payment
• Annual leave enhancements recognising long service 
• Day off for your birthday 
• Defined contribution group personal pension plan 
• Enhanced sick pay 
• Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption pay 
• Eye care 
• Hearing tests 
• Learning and Development opportunities 
• Discounts on merchandise at Hearing Dog gift shops 
• Pet Dog Policy

For further information and to apply, please visit our website via the apply button.

Closing date: 16th July 2026.

Please note: This post is exempt from the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 due to its duties involving the protection of children and/or adults at risk. Applicants are therefore required to disclose all spent and unspent convictions, cautions, warnings, and reprimands, as well as any relevant non-conviction information. The successful candidate will be required to undertake a Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check in accordance with the Police Act 1997 (Part V).