The Belay Foundation supports adoptive, kinship and special guardianship families raising children who have experienced early developmental trauma, often alongside neurodiversity. Founded in 2020 from lived experience, Belay offers something many families struggle to find elsewhere: practical, in-home support and expert guidance that’s genuinely trauma-responsive, delivered by people who understand what these families are living through.
Why now? - Belay has just spent a year strengthening its foundations - redesigning services, building organisational capacity and setting an ambitious growth plan. The groundwork is done. What we need now is a permanent CEO with the vision to take a small, high-impact charity and turn real momentum into lasting change - for families and for how the sector understands and responds to developmental trauma.
About the role - You’ll provide strategic and financial leadership across a small team, working closely with an exceptional Board and Belay’s Founder, who remains closely involved as Services Director. You’ll lead fundraising and income diversification, shape Belay’s public voice and ensure the organisation’s trauma-responsive, DDP-informed model continues to deliver real impact as it scales.
This is a rare chance to take the helm of an organisation with an innovative model, a loyal community and genuine room to grow - and to leave your mark on how the UK supports some of its most vulnerable children and families.
This is a home‑based role, but applicants must be permanently based, and have the right to work, in the United Kingdom. For legal, tax, and operational reasons, we cannot consider applications from outside the UK.
Please see the CEO Application Pack for further details, including the full job description and the application/ interview process.
Registered Charity
6 - 10
The Belay Foundation aims to improve the life chances of children in adoptive, kinship care and special guardian families.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
Thank you!
The young people, children and families that we support are at the heart of everything we do at Mermaids. We have ambitious plans to expand the reach and impact of our youth work. To support this growth, we are recruiting an Interim Youth Officer who will play a key role in overseeing our youth programmes and activities. The successful candidate will help increase our capacity to engage with more young people, provide high-quality support, and ensure the continued delivery of our core youth services while contributing to the development of new opportunities for young people. This role is fully remote, full time with a four day working week (32 hours).
Mermaids is an equal opportunity employer. We encourage applications from those with lived experiences (directly or indirectly) and/or close ties to the LGBTQ+ community. We actively support and encourage people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences to join us and shape what we do. We are particularly keen to receive applications from BPOC (black and people of colour) and/or disabled and trans candidates.
Registered Charity
11 - 20
Supporting trans, non-binary and gender-diverse children, young people and their families since 1995
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.