Policy director jobs

About the Role

Are you someone who thrives on helping others, solving problems, and making a tangible difference in people’s lives? We’re looking for a committed and empathetic Student Advisor to join the Advice Service team at the University of Manchester Students’ Union (UMSU).

In this vital role, you’ll provide free, independent, and confidential advice to students across a range of key areas. Whether it’s supporting someone through an academic appeal, navigating complex housing issues, managing financial hardship, or dealing with personal challenges, your role is to ensure students feel heard, informed, and empowered to take the next steps.

You’ll be part of a small, dedicated team working in a busy, varied environment that puts student wellbeing at the heart of everything we do.

Key Responsibilities

• Deliver One-to-One Support: Provide impartial, confidential advice on academic concerns (appeals, complaints, disciplinaries), housing issues, financial support, and personal or welfare-related challenges.
• Support in Crisis: Offer guidance and emotional support to students experiencing difficult or distressing circumstances, such as mental health issues, harassment, or financial insecurity.
• Create and Share Resources: Develop accessible self-help materials (articles, videos, workshops) to empower students and reduce reliance on one-to-one services.
• Promote the Service: Take part in outreach activities, including campaigns, events, and training, to raise awareness and improve access to advice and support.
• Track and Report Issues: Use our case management system to record casework clearly and securely, and help monitor trends in student issues to inform future campaigns.
• Collaborate and Contribute: Work closely with colleagues across UMSU to support key periods like Welcome Week and elections, contributing to a supportive and inclusive student experience.

See the full role profile including the person specification for more details. 

Lead a movement of hope and healing. Transform lives. Build a brand that truly matters.
Are you a strategic storyteller and purpose-driven leader ready to inspire action and grow a globally recognised charity brand?

Mercy Ships UK is on a mission — to double income, triple volunteer engagement, and reach even more patients across sub-Saharan Africa with free, life-changing surgery. As our new Head of Brand and Communications, you won’t just manage messaging — you’ll shape how the world sees and supports this bold, faith-rooted vision of medical transformation.

This is your chance to:

• Craft campaigns that touch hearts and spark action

• Lead a creative, high-performing team with integrity and innovation

• Elevate the voice of a charity changing the narrative on global healthcare

• Collaborate with global teams to build a brand rooted in love, service, and excellence

We’re not looking for someone who ticks boxes. We want a communications visionary who believes in the power of storytelling, knows how to make a message stick, and is energised by ambitious goals.

If that sounds like you — and you’re ready to be part of something bigger — we’d love to hear from you.

The position of CEO is an exciting and challenging role that is primarily external facing in order to promote and further develop the essential support we provide to families in need throughout Camden and Islington.

A key aspect is to continue growing our network of stakeholders, partners, corporate sponsors, commissioners and donors. The CEO will also be expected to lead the drive to secure new income streams, and maintain existing relationships with key funders and stakeholders.

The CEO works with the Board of Trustees to drive the future strategy, ensure fulfilment of the implementation plan and direct a staff team comprising a Head of Delivery, 3 Family Liaison Managers, An Operations Manager, a Community Projects Manager, a Bookkeeper, and a Fundraising Consultant.

There is considerable scope for the post-holder to make a real difference and significantly further raise our profile within the community that we serve, building on our track record of excellence and impact as one of the leading organisations affecting social change in the local area.

Core Responsibilities

· Support the team in identifying funders and income generation opportunities

· Build networks with new and existing funders to engage their support

· Represent and participate at external events and meetings to promote HSC&I

· Actively contribute to expanding the role and influence of Home-Start London consortium in the wider London area

· Be accountable for the management of resources to enable us to actively support a minimum of 90 to 120 families at any one time

· Provide leadership and oversight to colleagues and volunteers to ensure the correct outcomes for families through training, governance and quality assurance

· Performance and line management of Head of Delivery, Funding and Projects Manager and Bookkeeper

· Annual budget setting in conjunction with the Treasurer, and ongoing monitoring and reporting of financial position

· Provide management reports to the Trustee Board on progress against key performance measures

· Ensure that we remain compliant with all legislative and policy changes that impact the charity and our processes

· Understand the impact of legislative, changing political, economic and social climate on our work, and share this knowledge within the team to ensure compliance

Personal Specification / Attributes

The successful candidate will be an experienced Senior Manager/Chief Executive with a demonstrable track record of successfully running an organisation or team leadership. You will possess strong strategic management, governance and people skills in addition to being solution focussed. Excellent stakeholder management skills are essential as is the ability to generate income from a range of sources.

Essential knowledge and skills

· Three years experience as a Senior Manager / Chief Executive

· Ability to prioritise and manage a varied workload, working to tight deadlines

· Demonstrable success in raising significant income from a variety of external sources

· Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills

· Accomplished at providing motivational and influential leadership

· Proven track record of successfully delivering change

· Good understanding of financial accounting and budgeting in the charity sector

· Strategic and innovative thinking

· Understanding, interpreting and presenting Management Information and data

· Previous experience of working with organisations in social services or health, with an understanding of the public sector commissioning process

· Good working knowledge of MS Office suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, SharePoint)

Preferred experience but not essential

· Experience of working in the voluntary sector

· A background in health and wellbeing

· Safeguarding children and working with families

· Understanding and interest in perinatal mental health, isolation, early years’ development and recovery through crisis.

· Using Charitylog or other CRM platforms

· Presentations and public speaking

Affiliation

Home-Start Camden & Islington is affiliated to the national organisation Home-Start UK, but we are autonomous and responsible for own management and securing our own funding. Home-Start UK provides support and advice to over 300 Home-Start schemes around the UK, and manages a stringent Quality Assurance Review process to ensure schemes operate effectively.

Notes

· The CEO will benefit from supported career progression, including mentorship if appropriate.

· Home-Start Camden & Islington offers a staff pension contribution.

· The post holder would be expected to attend evening and weekend meetings whenever necessary, and agreed Time of in Lieu (TOIL) is available for this work.

· Applications from people who reflect the community we support are most welcome

· The post holder will need to complete an enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service check (DBS)

This role will lead the delivery of the Trase communication strategy over the next 5 year strategic period.

Working as part of the Impact team within Trase, alongside those engaging directly with companies, governments and financial institutions, you will lead a small team to deliver strategic communications - press, media, content production, events, social media, promotion and publicity, including outreach to multipliers and amplifiers. 

You will drive communications to support the engagement work of the Trase team, making tactical choices to best deliver the overall mission of the initiative.

Our communications work is purposeful, targeted and and evaluated for its contribution to our strategic aims - rather than Opportunity To See numbers or the number of pieces placed.

You will bring your experience of developing communications strategies on global issues working with multiple partners to find and tell the story of Trase, what we can learn from the data, and what this means for the world.

You will be part of a leading, multinational, multidisciplinary, and multilingual team of experts, working across the Trase initiative to help ensure the delivery of this exciting program of work is effective, manageable and fun. We value diversity, inclusivity and creativity at the core of what we do and we welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds to apply.

For success in this role, these things will matter the most: 

• Strategic vision - able to bring clarity and secure collaborative buy-in on how communications can deliver on strategic influencing objectives
• Collaboration and leadership - able to create buy-in and enthusiasm around communications, motivating team members to deliver and supporting them to flourish
• Writing - demonstrable experience of creating compelling and concise written pieces both from scratch and from detailed technical information, accurately and creatively
• Planning - demonstrable experience of creating and delivering communications plans for the release of new data sets, to share insights, or in response to external events, to deliver on Trase’s strategic priorities
• Decision-making - able to make sound tactical decisions to ensure our external communications work remains tightly aligned with our strategy for engagement and impact
• Essential behavioural competencies: 
• Solutions and action-oriented: able to prioritise effectively and work autonomously to develop and deliver strategy/tactics. Meets deadlines and proactively ensures dependencies are in place.
• Entrepreneurial and adaptable: able to respond flexibly to a fast-moving internal and external context, and to get new ideas off the ground.

Required skills and experience:

• Track record in creating, delivering and evaluating communications plans; including press and media relations as well as a wide suite of digital communications channels.
• Experience and success in strategic communications i.e. using communications to deliver on strategic goals through many routes, including advocacy, engagement, partnership working.
• Track record of working with complex or technical information and making it accessible to a variety of audiences.
• Track record of working on global issues with multiple partners.
• Experience of building relationships with journalists, and partnering with other organisations to leverage impact.
• Experience working with people from different backgrounds and cultures, ideally in a geographically dispersed organisation.
• Management experience (line management, volunteer management, or freelance service providers).
• Fluency in English.

Desired skills and experience:

• Experience communicating messages that represent minority or underrepresented groups.
• Language skills in one or more of the Trase core languages: Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Bahasa Indonesia, French, Mandarin Chinese.
• Experience of working in organisations with a multi-project portfolio, and working with partner organisations.

The successful candidate must live in the UK. Global Canopy can support with visa sponsorship if required. 

We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all of the qualifications listed.

This is an exciting time to join TCV and lead our newly created team. We are looking for an enthusiastic, energetic, confident individual - someone who wants to make a difference and is always willing to go the extra mile and leads by example.

Working directly with your team and the wider income generation team, you will be responsible for setting and implementing our strategic plan aligned to securing income through Trusts, Foundations and Lotteries - working with your team you will identify and develop funding proposals to those partners and stakeholders which sit outside our corporate partnership team.

With your team, you will look to develop innovative ideas and compelling proposals which enable TCV to connect even more people to the green spaces around them, across:
- Environment/nature
- Health and Wellbeing
- Learning and Skills

You will be responsible for developing and bringing to life this new approach for TCV - with an ambition to secure national and or multi-regional funding, enabling us to connect even more people to green spaces.

Ideally you will have already worked in the charity sector and are able to demonstrate experience in leading a team to secure an annual income in excess of £1m across various funding streams.

You should be confident in your ability to set ambitious goals and high standards - and be capable and experienced in leading and supporting a team to achieve both the goals and the standards. You will have ultimate responsibility for leading on both identifying and creating a pipeline of TFL funding streams to meet our annual income target.

As the lead for the TFL team, you must be confident in your ability to communicate our case for support to your team, and to both our internal and external stakeholders, ensuring our proposals are compelling, well thought out and deliver value and impact for both our funding partners and TCV.

We would expect you to be skilled and experienced in writing compelling funding applications and be able to critique and act as a sounding board for your teams own individual applications.

If you're looking for your next exciting senior role in the charity sector and feel you have the experience and drive to deliver this role - please get in touch.

You are going to lead a team with very big ambitions for 2025 and beyond!

The role will require some travel and overnight stays from time to time.

A full, clean or near clean UK driving licence is required for this post, which has been held for a minimum of one year.

To fulfil the role, you must be resident in the UK and have the right to work in the UK.

To help Harmony Works deliver our vision, we are seeking a skilled, motivated, innovative and energetic new member of staff to co-create and deliver an exciting programme of engagement and participation.

Are you passionate about working with communities to promote the benefits of music? Do you want to support more inclusive opportunities for people to enjoy the arts and heritage?

Harmony Works is restoring and extending Grade II* listed Canada House in the centre of Sheffield as an inspiring new home for musical activity. We will open the doors of a stunning heritage building for the first time in decades to provide spaces to learn, practise, create, perform and socialise, particularly for children and young people.

To help Harmony Works deliver our vision, we are seeking a skilled, motivated, innovative and energetic new member of staff to co-create and deliver an exciting programme of engagement and participation. 

Key Relationships

The postholder will work as part of a team, supporting, developing and managing existing relationships with key project stakeholders.  They will reach out to develop new relationships with individuals, local groups, schools and organisations to facilitate partnerships working, increase awareness of and support for the project, and to recruit volunteers. This is a new role. 

We are an inclusive employer and offer equal opportunities to all regardless of an individual’s age, disability, gender identity, marriage or civil partnership status, pregnancy or maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. Any offer of employment will be made subject to valid right to work in the UK being provided.

Law Centres tell us that their biggest concern right now is staff recruitment and retention. Supported by the Advice Workforce Development Fund, Law Centres Network has undertaken a programme of work to help ensure the long-term sustainability of the Law Centre workforce. Although initially focused on London, this work will benefit our network across the UK as we gain deeper insights, develop best practice, and co-produce new approaches.

We are looking for someone to work with Law Centres across London and co-ordinate a joint effort between Law Centres, LCN and other partners to improve recruitment, career progression, and staff retention in Law Centres and the wider social welfare legal advice sector.

We are the Law Centres Network (LCN). We make the UK a fairer place by helping people get justice, even if they cannot afford a lawyer. For nearly fifty years, we have been at the centre of a movement for social justice and we believe that people in greater need should get more help. Together with local Law Centres, we deliver faster, more accessible and more joined-up help. We do this by supporting Law Centres to get more help to people in need, bringing Law Centres together to solve systemic problems, and speaking out for change.

Many problems that people face involve the law – being treated unfairly at work, issues with their landlord, problems with welfare benefits, or being discriminated against. Law Centres employ lawyers and other professionals, who are experts in this kind of everyday problem. They give people legal advice and can represent them if they need it. They use the law to solve problems that hold people back, so they can get on with their lives. There are over 40 Law Centres across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The Training Administrator provides overall administrative support to Bild’s Workforce Development & Qualifications as well as being the first point of contact for Respond training, from enquiry through to the end of the training taking place and managing any issues that arise.

This includes general training enquiries, drawing up training contracting agreements, coordinating trainers, setting up training arrangements, collating evaluations, booking of trains and venues, and refreshments. Communicating with participants and trainers regularly and troubleshooting where necessary.

The Training Administrator ensures the customer journey is sensitively managed and the training enquiries and bookings are effectively managed from referral or enquiry to delivery.

The Training Administrator works with Responds Lead Trainer and is responsible for the operational delivery of the current external and internal training programme.

They will both manage and administer all bookings and must therefore have strong administrative and organisational skills

Within our Marketing & Commercial department sits the Digital team. Responsible for Battersea’s digital output, our goal is to drive innovation and impact online. We manage Battersea’s website, and lead its digital products, campaigns and advertising – all to increase awareness of Battersea’s work and engage people with the need to support our dogs and cats. 

As Website Coordinator, you will support the whole Digital Products team in our ambition to create sector-leading user experiences across our website and suite of digital products. We are looking for someone skilled in proactively identifying opportunities for enhancing our Digital Products and effectively coordinate the implementation of these improvements. 
 

What we can offer you:
In return for your commitment to our cause and to recognise the value of our employees, Battersea offers a range of benefits to support the wellbeing of our employees. These include:

- 28 days of annual leave (plus 8 days paid public holidays) per year
- Discounted gym memberships and cycle to work schemes
- Employee Assistance Programme and access to Wellbeing Resources.
- Generous pension contributions – up to 10% employer contribution
- Free healthcare cash plan, where you can claim for a range of treatment including dental, optical, physiotherapy, chiropody and acupuncture every year.
- Annual interest-free season ticket loans

We are also committed to providing learning and development to our employees. During your time with us, we provide support for your professional and career development, including access to digital and in-person training programmes, leadership and management training, mentoring and much more.

Our hybrid working model:
We operate a 50% onsite hybrid working model, with our office-based staff splitting their time between site based and home working. This enables our office-based staff to balance the benefits of home working with onsite collaboration and maintaining a connection to our cause.

Diversity and inclusion:
We are committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive experience for all staff, volunteers and trustees and those hoping to join us. We operate an anonymised shortlisting process and actively seek to ensure our process is fair and equitable for all.

We understand the value of diverse voices, perspectives, and experiences to help us deliver even more for our dogs and cats, and we welcome applicants from all sections of the community.

As a Disability Confident Committed Employer we will ask about any adjustments you may need at application and/or interview stage, and if you are offered a role with us, we’ll talk to you about any workplace adjustments you may need to help you perform at your best. 

More about us:
At Battersea, we aim to never turn away a dog or cat in need of help. We give each one lots of love, expert care and get to know their characters and quirks so we can find them a new home that’s just right for them. Join us and help us be here for every dog and cat, wherever they are, for as long as they need us.

We will be interviewing for this position on a rolling basis, so we would recommend applying early. We will close the vacancy once it is filled.

To apply for the role, please click the button below.