About you
You will be an experienced, approachable community-facing professional with a strong background in mental health, emotional wellbeing or psychosocial support and community engagement.
You will be skilled at building trust with people who may experience stigma, cultural, language or other barriers to accessing appropriate mental health support, particularly within Global Majority communities.
You will be confident facilitating groups and sensitive conversations, culturally aware and non-judgemental, with the judgement to provide appropriate early support while maintaining clear professional boundaries. You will be proactive, adaptable and able to develop creative approaches that respond to the different needs of communities.
The Opportunity
This is an opportunity to join Happy Healthy You and help develop its community-based mental health and emotional wellbeing work and related activities, building on trusted relationships while creating new approaches and support shaped around what communities actually need.
Through working on the Bhip Programme, you will reach people and communities who may be less connected to existing mental health support, creating safe, culturally responsive ways to talk about mental health, build connection and access appropriate support. Working alongside communities and the wider Bhip team, you will help turn lived experience, stories and insight into better community responses, stronger pathways and practical changes to how mental health support works across Bradford.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.
About you
You will be an experienced, community-focused practitioner with a strong background in co-design, participation, community research or related approaches, and experience of working directly with Global Majority communities and people from different faiths, cultures and backgrounds.
You will be a skilled facilitator and listener, able to build trust, work sensitively with lived experience and use creative, culturally grounded approaches to involve people meaningfully.
You will be curious, practical and adaptable, confident working collaboratively while also taking the lead on developing and delivering Bhip’s co-design approach.
The Opportunity
This is an exciting and unique opportunity to help shape and lead an ambitious approach to community co-design within HHU and the Bhip Programme, working alongside Global Majority communities experiencing some of Bradford’s greatest health inequities.
You will work directly with people and communities to explore their experiences of clinical and community-based health and care, including where racism, discrimination and structural barriers affect access, experience and outcomes. Using co-design, participatory research, deep listening, storytelling and creative approaches, you will explore what matters, what gets in the way and what communities tell us needs to change.
A key part of the role will be developing culturally grounded and accessible ways of working, recognising that conventional consultation and research methods do not work equally well for everyone. You will have the freedom to test and develop different approaches with communities, including creative, visual, narrative and participatory methods, and share what we learn locally and through Bhip’s wider national lottery collective network.
You will lead the development of Bhip’s co-design methodology while remaining a hands-on practitioner. Working closely with the HHU Programme Manager, Bhip Programme Lead, Insight & Evaluation Lead and Community Engagement Facilitators, you will help connect community participation, research and lived experience to Bhip’s Story-to-System approach, ensuring that what communities tell us can contribute to practical learning, action and change.
You will also help build the confidence and capacity of the wider Bhip team to work in genuinely co-designed ways and, where people want to become more involved, support community members and lived-experience leaders to develop as co-designers, peer/community researchers or Story Stewards.
The role will evolve as Bhip develops. We do not expect every method or area of work to be predetermined. We are looking for someone with the experience, curiosity and judgement to work alongside communities, test ideas, learn from what works and help us develop approaches that are meaningful in Bradford and potentially useful much more widely.
The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.