Finance, Benefit and Debt Coach

Are you a proactive, flexible, and target-driven individual with a proven record of working with male adults in the criminal justice system whether in the community or in prisons?  Do you have extensive recent experience of providing specialist money and/or Welfare benefit advice? 

If so, St Giles Trust is looking for a collaborative Finance, Benefits & Debt Coach to join our team, providing a range of support to community offenders and prison leavers around issues such as debt, finance and welfare benefits advice and support.  

About St Giles Trust  

An ambitious, well-established charity that helps people facing adversity to find jobs, homes, and the right support they need.Central to our ethos is our beliefthat people with first-hand experience of successfully overcoming issues such as an offending background, homelessness, addictions, and gang involvement, hold the key to positive change in others. 

About this key role 

As our Finance, Benefits & Debt Coach, you will provide person-centred support to a caseload of service users who will either be serving community sentences or have been released from prison.  This will involve undertaking assessment and action planning with individual service users and creating a safe and trusting environment, using trauma-informed practice to successfully facilitate a supportive and constructive relationship with service users.  

We will also count on you to deliver a range of interventions to service users which contribute towards the achievement of prescribed outcomes, including group work sessions.  Developing and maintaining positive working relationships with external agencies and working towards contractual targets and outcomes within agreed timescales and in line with specified quality standards are also vital aspects of the role. 

As an organisation that works with children and adults at risk we are committed to safeguarding, protecting, and promoting the safety of our clients. An enhanced DBS check is required for all successful applicants. 

Vetting process will be in accordance with Cabinet Office Baseline Personnel Security Standards (BPSS) and will include Enhanced DBS check. The contract also requires clearance through HMPPS vetting.   

What we are looking for 

• Experience of engaging successfully with challenging people, e.g., those with complex and multiple needs 

• Proven record of working with partner agencies 

• Evidence of training at specialist level in money and/or welfare benefits advice  

• Higher level certificate in money and/or welfare benefit advice from accreditation  

• The ability to assess clients’ needs and provide tailored, client-led support  

• Able to work sensitively with clients applying trauma informed strategies 

• Excellent interpersonal, relationship building and communication skills, both verbal and written 

In return, you can expect a competitive salary, generous leave allowance, staff pension, flexible working, a mentoring programme, an advice and counselling service, clinical therapist sessions, life insurance (4 x annual salary), duvet days, season ticket loan, employee perks programme, eye care voucher and much more. 

We are an equity and inclusion confident employer. We welcome all applications, and we particularly encourage applications from people of the global majority (black, brown, multi- heritage) and those who identify as disabled, neuroexpansive, neurodiverse, with any protected characteristics and/or social barriers or challenges. We value the empowering and informative impact that all lived experiences and diversity of thought can offer the organisation. 

St Giles will guarantee to interview all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria set out in the Job Description for the vacancy. 

This is a Fixed term, full time role until 31st March 2027.