Advice, Information Jobs
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Contact is a national charity for families with disabled children. We provide information, advice and support, and bring families together so they can support each other. We campaign to improve their circumstances, and for their right to be included and equal in society.
Your role
You will be the parent or carer of a child or young person with Autism.
You will provide an advice, information and guidance service to predominantly Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) and East European families in the London Borough of Ealing who have been referred to the All Age Autism Hub for assessment.
You will respond to first enquiries and contribute to the Ealing All The Autism referral hub service development and workings of the Hub as an expert by experience.
You will support group sessions for the Autism Hub as well as any of the Ealing run projects as and when required. You will support the Hub clinical team and Contact Ealing colleagues with administrative support around group sessions and training for families and professionals.
You will assess families’ needs and plan actions with parents’ participation as per their needs. You will encourage parent carers’ empowerment and involvement in the project.
What we’re looking for
- Parent of autistic child or young person
- Experience of working with and supporting families who have disabled children.
- Good organisational and administrative skills
- Knowledge and experience of the issues and concerns that affect families who have disabled children e.g. leisure provision, education, respite care.
- Knowledge of issues relating to maximising income, tackling debt and budgeting, accessing financial support, tax credits and other financial issues.
- Good communication, time management and networking skills.
How to apply
Please return a completed application form along with an equal opportunities monitoring form (downloadable as part of the job pack) by the date stated below. CV’s will not be accepted.
Closing date: 1 May 2024
Interview date: 7 or 8 May 2024
About us:
Action for M.E. is the only charity in the UK providing direct support including healthcare to children and adults with M.E.. We provide vital support services, campaign for change and invest in ground-breaking research to help put an end to the ignorance, injustice and neglect experienced by people with M.E.
Opportunity:
Having been paused to new referrals, Action for M.E.’s free, independent, Adults Advocacy service will soon be re-opening. It’s one of our range of free Support Services that work with adults, young people, and/or families living with M.E. We support colleagues across the team to take part in and share reflective practice, self-care, peer-support and training.
Our Adults Advocacy service offers non-statutory, single-issue, instructed advocacy for adults with a confirmed diagnosis of M.E. We encourage self-advocacy where possible, though many of our clients are too severely affected by M.E. to be able to take undertake this.
As an Adults Advocate, you will manage a caseload of clients, as well as inputting and contributing to the triage process along with your Advocacy colleagues. You will meet with clients by phone, email, Zoom and/or SMS; we can also facilitate communication by post if this is required. We are not able to offer home visits or face to face meetings.
What we can offer you:
We offer fully remote and flexible working with generous annual leave (30 days plus bank holidays, pro rata). The wellbeing of our staff is important to us, we offer a range of benefits to employees including (but not limited to) access to free counselling and voluntary wellbeing weekday sessions, examples of recent sessions include guided group meditations and a book club.
To view the full job description, download the job pack, and apply for this role, please visit our Recruitee site (please note that we only accept applications via Recruitee; any application sent directly to an Action for M.E. mailbox will not be considered).
Should you have any questions about the role, or require any reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process, please don’t hesitate to contact our recruitment team, details of how to do this are contained in the application pack, "how to apply" section.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
Our work reaches into the heart of the communities of Oxfordshire, and we’re pleased to be expanding our Community Engagement work into the areas of Cherwell and West Oxfordshire. The key towns in these areas are Banbury, Bicester, Kidlington, Witney, Carterton and Chipping Norton, including surrounding villages. Your role will be to set up peer-to-peer support groups, information days, befriending partnerships, and to be a point of contact for our work in the north and west of the county. Our mission is to support visually impaired people to live independent and active lives and you’ll be playing a key part in this.
Job Title: Community Engagement Worker (North and West)
Hours: 35 hours per week
Salary: £23,000 – £28,000 per year dependent on experience
Annual Leave: 25 days per year plus bank holidays (to increase after 3-years)
Contract Type: Permanent (6-month probationary period)
Reporting to: Community Engagement Lead
Start date: Summer 2024
Base: Office/home-based with frequent travel across Cherwell and West Oxfordshire.
Closing Date: Midday 29th April 2024
Interview Date: Wednesday 8th May 2024 (in person at Bradbury Lodge, Oxford)
Job Purpose:
To support visually impaired people to live independent and active lives by providing a range of activities and groups across the north and west of Oxfordshire.
Duties:
- Setting up and supporting peer-to-peer support groups
- Holding information days within local libraries, community centres and other key locations
- Setting up walking groups as part of our Green Walks Project
- Demonstrating and setting up daily living equipment and assistive technology with support from the tech team
- Assisting in the setup of befriending partnerships alongside the Volunteer Coordinator
- Connect, share, and learn with partners and other organisations
- Being a point of contact for MyVision within the North and West of Oxfordshire
Other duties:
- Provide talks and training as needed
- Support the Fundraising team with local events and initiatives
- Keep accurate records of interactions and activites
- Attend relevant meetings, training, workshops, and webinars
- Support the team with furthering the objectives and goals of the organisation
- Other reasonable duties set out by your line manager and Chief Executive
- There may, on occasion, be a need to work outside normal hours e.g., weekends and evenings
Breakdown of duties
This is a rough guide to your duties; flexibility will be required.
Tasks% of your timePeer Support Groups and Activities40%Info Days and Equipment Demos20%Befriending Support25%Other duties15%
Person Specification
NOTE: We expect candidates to evidence how they meet the criteria in their covering letter. This can be through work, volunteering, and your personal life.
Essential skills, experience, and knowledge:
- Experience of setting up community-based initiatives (for example: groups, clubs, activities etc)
- The ability to research, create and manage working relationships with local groups/organisations across Oxfordshire.
- Good IT skills
- Good communication skills in person, over the telephone and online
- The ability to travel around the county, whether with your own car, public transport or Access to Work support, please see below regarding Access to Work.
- Ideally located within or nearby Cherwell, West Oxfordshire, or Oxford city.
Desirable:
- Lived or learned experience of visual impairment
- Experience of working with visually impaired people
- Experience of providing community-based services for a disability charity
Personal Qualities
- The ability to work under own initiative
- Good communicator
- Creative thinker and problem solving
- A supportive team player
This role may suit someone with lived experience of sight loss, MyVision is a strong advocate of Lived Experience with over half of our employees having a visual impairment. The role would also suit someone who has strong communication skills and the ability to support, encourage and engage people. We also recognise many skills are transferrable and welcome applications from people with varying experiences and backgrounds.
Please evidence how you meet the person specifications in your covering letter.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
Actively Interviewing
This organisation is scheduling interviews as the applications come in. Don’t miss your opportunity, apply now!
About the role:
At a time of growth and of new opportunities for the Foundation, we want to make faster progress to realise our vision of funding, supporting, researching, and innovating, so all disabled people can make the journeys they choose.
Our Innovation Team, in place since 2020, aims to support the Foundation to reach more disabled people, and explores a wide range of current and future transport modes and technologies and how they could be made accessible. Flagship projects include grant funding the National Centre for Accessible Transport (ncat), setting up a new model of car club in rural areas, and an influencing initiative targeting Government and industry to ensure the transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is inclusive. The Team has also commissioned a wide range of robust research, including on our flagship intervention, the Motability Scheme, and grant funded partners in the disability sector to do the same.
This is a brand new role based in our Innovation Team, working closely with Communications colleagues, to use our existing evidence base and that of our partners to develop robust policy positions. As a politically neutral organisation that does not currently have a policy function, we want our start to policy work to be rooted in structured research, drawing out themes across transport modes and disability types to tell a clear story about what changes would make the biggest difference to disabled people. We want to do so in a transparent way that prioritises sharing what we know and convening key stakeholders to bring them on a journey with us.
You will work with internal staff to proactively identify opportunities to influence emerging from our portfolio of innovation projects. You will lead on Motability Foundation’s responses to high-profile Government consultations, coordinating closely between the Innovation and Communications Teams. Where there is alignment and reputational benefit, you may engage external partners to amplify each other’s positions and share expertise. You will develop and implement a specific research programme geared towards supporting us to develop robust policy positions.
You will lean on the subject matter expertise of the Innovation and Communications Teams, but also develop your own knowledge where necessary.
About you:
Must haves:
- Experience commissioning robust qualitative and quantitative research.
- Experience using internal and external research findings and evidence to develop robust policy positions and respond to high-profile Government consultations.
- Understanding of decision-making processes in central and local government, at civil service and political levels.
- Ability to facilitate sensitive internal conversations to reach a point of consensus on policy positions.
- Ability to engage effectively with stakeholders in Government, industry, and other charities and foundations.
- Exceptional written and oral influencing skills, including the judicious use of data and evidence and the compelling presentation of the case for change.
- Highly IT literate with extensive experience of Microsoft Office, particularly Excel and PowerPoint.
Nice to haves:
- Understanding of key disability and transport issues, such as the social model of disability, inclusive micro mobility, the transition to electric vehicles, or user-centered design.
Motability Foundation
At Motability Foundation we fund, support, research and innovate so that all disabled people can make the journeys they choose. We oversee the Motability Foundation Scheme and provide grants to help people use it, providing access to transport to hundreds of thousands of people a year.
We award grants to other charities and organisations who provide different types of transport, or work towards making transport accessible. We also carry out ongoing research, in partnership with disabled people and key stakeholders in the industry, to inspire innovations that continue to champion accessible transport for all.
Benefits
⭐️ WHAT MOTABILITY CAN OFFER YOU ⭐️
A career with Motability can offer you so much more than earning potential. We pride ourselves in offering some fantastic benefits and a culture to match, some of which includes;
Holiday – 26 Days + 8 Bank Holidays, increasing to 28 days after 5 years’ service
❤️ Health and Wellbeing – We offer private health care with BUPA alongside an Employee Assistance Programme, eye tests, flu vaccinations, enhanced sick pay and discounted corporate gym membership. We take your physical AND Mental Health seriously, with our dedicated mental health first aiders you will have support and understanding from your colleagues.
Family Friendly – We offer enhanced Parental Leave inclusive of Adoption Pay and we understand that families require flexibility, we provide time off for dependants, flexible working hours and the option to work from home. Life Assurance is 4 x your salary.
Diversity and Inclusion - We value everyone’s unique qualities and celebrate having a diverse and inclusive culture where everyone feels safe to be their authentic selves, no matter their age, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability status, neurodiversity or otherwise. This is embedded in to our values and we celebrate our differences and create awareness throughout the year.
Celebrating Success – We love to recognise people that go above and beyond with our Spotlight Award as well as having team celebrations and social events throughout the year.
☕️ Our culture - In the Motability office we “dress for our day”, it’s an incredibly welcoming and inclusive environment where we look to support your career, we offer a mini bus service from Harlow Town centre and station for those using public transport to reach us and there are plenty of free hot beverages for when you arrive.
Pension – Up to 15%, inclusive of a 10% non-contributory addition and Motability matching your contributions up to 5%
How to find out more?
To find out more regarding the vacancy and for the full job description, please contact our Talent Team.
Here at Motability Foundation, we embrace and value Diversity, Inclusion and Equity which means bringing your full self to work. We encourage and welcome all applications, regardless of age, gender identity, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or disability.
We are a disability confident employer, so please do make us aware of any reasonable adjustments you might need throughout both the recruitment process and to work with us.
We are committed to offering to interview every disabled applicant who meets the minimum criteria for the job. Once you have applied please send us an email stating that you have a disclosed disability and we will offer you an interview.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.