5 Head of professional status volunteer roles in Edinburgh

About this Role

Location: Remote (Global)

Commitment: Volunteer Unpaid Position, 10-15 Hours per Week

Reports to: Head of Recruitment

About Solution Community: an international 501(c)(3) non-profit organization pioneering an innovative social platform dedicated to enabling actionable change. With volunteers from over 70+ countries, we are a testament to the power of global collaboration. Our team members bring experience from some of the world’s most successful companies, including Apple, Toyota, Google, Netflix, Walmart, Meta, Microsoft, and many others, creating a rich tapestry of knowledge and passion.

Our Mission: To foster a global community of compassion, uniting individuals and organizations to solve the world’s social problems. We bridge non-profits, businesses, philanthropists, and volunteers, empowering them to create meaningful change for current and future generations.

Our Vision: Imagine a world where every person can thrive—a world united by collaboration, compassion, and action. At Solution Community, we are making that vision a reality and driving change that will shape the future.

Professional Volunteering: skills-based service performed with the same reliability, accountability, and quality expected in a paid professional role. Volunteers are core contributors whose work directly supports our mission of global compassion, collaboration, and action.

Position Summary

Solution Community is seeking an experienced, passionate Volunteer Development/Fundraising Network Senior Recruiter to attract, engage, and onboard talented fundraising and development professionals. This strategic volunteer role will help build a strong network of fundraising leaders, donor engagement specialists, grant professionals, and development experts who can contribute to the organization's long-term sustainability and impact.

The ideal candidate is an experienced recruiter with expertise in sourcing and recruiting talent within nonprofit development, philanthropy, fundraising, donor relations, corporate partnerships, or advancement functions.

Key Responsibilities

Talent Acquisition & Recruitment

• Develop and implement recruitment strategies to identify and attract fundraising and development professionals.
• Source, screen, interview, and assess candidates for volunteer and leadership opportunities within the fundraising network.
• Build and maintain talent pipelines across philanthropy, nonprofit development, donor relations, grants management, and corporate social responsibility sectors.
• Partner with organizational leaders to understand current and future fundraising talent needs.
• Ensure a positive and engaging candidate experience throughout the recruitment process.

Network Development & Community Building

• Expand and strengthen a diverse network of fundraising professionals, grant writers, development officers, donor relationship managers, and fundraising consultants.
• Establish relationships with professional associations, nonprofit networks, universities, and community organizations.
• Promote volunteer opportunities through networking, social media, and professional platforms.
• Help create a sustainable pipeline of fundraising talent and volunteer leaders.

Strategic Support

• Collaborate with fundraising and leadership teams to identify priority recruitment needs.
• Assist in recruiting volunteers for fundraising campaigns, grant initiatives, donor outreach, and partnership development efforts.
• Provide market insights and recommendations on best practices for recruiting development and fundraising talent.
• Support diversity and inclusion efforts within volunteer recruitment initiatives.

Process Improvement & Reporting

• Maintain candidate records and recruitment tracking through Dover, our applicant tracking system (ATS).
• Monitor recruitment metrics and provide updates on pipeline activities.
• Recommend innovative sourcing techniques and engagement strategies.
• Support continuous improvement of volunteer recruitment processes.

Qualifications

Required

• 5+ years of experience in recruitment, talent acquisition, executive search, or volunteer recruitment.
• Experience recruiting for fundraising, nonprofit development, donor relations, philanthropy, partnerships, or advancement functions.
• Strong sourcing, interviewing, and stakeholder management skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication abilities.
• Ability to work independently in a remote and collaborative environment.
• Passion for nonprofit, community impact, and mission-driven work.

Preferred

• Experience working with nonprofit organizations, charities, foundations, or social impact initiatives.
• Familiarity with fundraising functions including donor stewardship, grant development, major gifts, and corporate partnerships.
• Existing network within the nonprofit, philanthropy, or fundraising community.
• Experience with LinkedIn Recruiter, Dover (ATS), or volunteer management platforms.
• Background recruiting senior-level or executive volunteers is a plus.

Core Competencies

• Strategic Recruiting
• Relationship Building
• Talent Sourcing

What We Offer

• Global collaboration with leaders and strategists from top global companies.
• Meaningful impact on global causes and communities.
• A vibrant, multicultural team spanning 70+ countries.
• A supportive environment rooted in compassion, integrity, innovation, and collaboration.
• Flexible work-life with full autonomy.
• Opportunities for personal and professional growth.
• A formal recommendation upon successful completion of your volunteer term.

As the Guild has grown in the past few years, our risk management, financial controls, and body of policies and procedures have also matured. Following the scheduled departure of two trustees earlier this year, the Guild’s Finance Subcommittee is seeking to welcome an independent member with relevant skills to attend meetings and advise on financial matters to help us make good decisions effectively.

This voluntary role supports trustees and staff by providing independent insight, constructive scrutiny, and professional expertise on financial planning, budgeting, risk, and long-term sustainability. As a guest to Finance Subcommittee meetings, you will review financial information, contribute to discussions, and help ensure resources are used effectively to maximise our charitable impact for students.

The Finance Subcommittee currently consists of two elected Officers, two external Trustees, and may include a student trustee in future. Papers and reports are ordinarily provided by the Guild Director, who is a non-voting guest to Subcommittee meetings. The Subcommittee normally meets four times per year for around two hours.

Students’ Union experience is not essential, but we are seeking a volunteer able to operate within our distinctive context. We are particularly interested in applicants with experience in finance, accounting, audit, charity governance, or business management.

Settle is a charity that supports young adults as they leave the care system and move into their first home. We provide intensive one-to-one coaching support, helping young people develop the skills and confidence they need to sustain their tenancies, manage their finances and live independently. Our preventative approach to homelessness helps care-experienced young people build stable foundations and thrive in adulthood.

All our Trustees bring different personal experience and professional expertise to support our work. To make sure we keep young people at the centre of our decision-making, we aim to always have at least two Trustees with care experience.

We are now looking for new Trustees to help us deliver our mission. We are seeking people with experience in one or more of the following areas:

· Policy influencing and/or strategic communications

· Support for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness

· Support for people seeking asylum and refuge

Our aim is to recruit at least two new Trustees, who between them bring experience across all three areas. We don’t expect you to lead an area of work at Settle – that’s the responsibility of the staff team. We are keen to benefit from your advice, insight and understanding of the key issues we’re dealing with.

We are committed to increasing the diversity of our staff and Board team, and we particularly welcome applications from people from minoritised ethnic backgrounds, or with other lived experience of discrimination. We are proud to be a member of the Care Leaver Covenant, and care-experienced applicants who meet the criteria for this role will be guaranteed an interview.

Founding Director of People, Culture & HR Innovation

Help us fix HR today — and design what HR becomes tomorrow.

We are looking for an experienced HR leader who is ready to do something very different.

Someone who understands HR, but also sees where it has become too bureaucratic, too process-driven and too disconnected from the creativity, ambition and humanity of the people it is supposed to support.

This is not a conventional HR management role.

This is a high-stakes founding opportunity to help rebuild our HR function from the ground up — while working with a team to design an entirely new, people-first way of working that could challenge the status quo.

The opportunity

Our immediate mission is practical: clean up, strengthen and professionalise our existing HR department.

That means looking honestly at what currently exists, identifying what works, what does not, what is missing and what has become unnecessarily complicated — then putting the right structures, policies, processes, governance and people practices in place.

But that is only the beginning.

Alongside fixing today's HR function, you will help us design the blueprint for the next generation of HR: an open-source HR platform and new way of working designed around people, creativity, innovation, development, fairness, accountability and better organisational culture.

We believe HR should be more than policies, procedures and risk management.

People are not processes.

Organisations should be places where people can think, create, challenge, develop, contribute and do meaningful work — while still having strong structures, accountability and professional standards.

We want to explore what HR could look like if we designed it around that principle from the beginning.

Two connected missions

1. Fix and strengthen HR today

You will initially help us:

• Review the existing HR function, structures and practices

• Identify gaps, weaknesses, risks and unnecessary bureaucracy

• Establish appropriate HR policies, procedures and governance

• Strengthen recruitment and onboarding

• Improve employee experience and people support

• Develop better approaches to performance, learning and development

• Ensure appropriate employment practices and HR compliance

• Create systems that can scale as the organisation grows

• Help build a strong people and culture foundation

2. Help invent HR for tomorrow

At the same time, you will work with the founding team to explore and develop:

• A blueprint for a new open-source HR platform

• A people-first approach to organisational design

• New approaches to employee voice and participation

• Better models for creativity, innovation and collaboration

• New approaches to leadership and personal development

• Psychological safety and healthy organisational culture

• Fairness, accountability and transparency

• The appropriate use of technology and AI in HR

• New ways of measuring organisational health and employee experience

• A framework that other organisations could potentially adopt, adapt and build upon

The ambition is not simply to improve HR within one organisation.

It is to ask:

What would HR look like if we were brave enough to redesign it properly?

You will be joining at a stage where there is significant work to do, significant problems to solve and significant things yet to be built.

That is precisely what makes the opportunity different.

For the right person, this could become a paid founding leadership position as the organisation develops, funding is secured and the wider structure is operationalised.

We are looking for someone who sees the potential in that journey rather than simply looking for an established job description and a finished organisation to step into.

This is an opportunity to:

build something.
lead something.
invent something.
leave a legacy.

If you have spent years watching organisations operate in ways that you knew could be better — and quietly thinking “someone should really change this” — this may be your opportunity to actually be one of the people who does.

You will not be doing it alone.

You will have the opportunity to build and work alongside a founding team, bring ideas into reality, test new approaches, learn from what does and does not work, and help shape something that can grow beyond its original founders.

The legacy opportunity

We are particularly interested in people who want their work to mean something beyond another position on a CV.

The long-term ambition is to create something that can be shared, developed and potentially adopted by others.

If successful, the HR model you help create could become part of a much larger body of work — something that demonstrates that organisations can be both high-performing and deeply human.

That is the opportunity.

Not to inherit someone else's HR system.

To help invent a better one.

Who we are looking for

You may be an experienced:

• HR Director

• Head of People

• People & Culture Director

• HR Transformation Leader

• Organisational Development Leader

• Senior HR Consultant

• HR strategist or practitioner

You should have substantial practical HR experience and understand the realities of employment, governance, organisational risk and people management.

But experience alone is not enough.

We want someone who:

• Thinks critically about conventional HR

• Is comfortable challenging established thinking

• Can distinguish between necessary structure and unnecessary bureaucracy

• Is genuinely people-centred

• Understands organisational design and culture

• Can move between strategy and practical implementation

• Has an interest in innovation, technology and AI

• Is capable of building systems rather than simply operating them

• Can work collaboratively with founders and other senior leaders

• Is comfortable working in an environment where not everything has already been figured out

• Wants to create, experiment and improve — not simply maintain the status quo

Most importantly, you should want to build something.

What we can offer

This is initially a voluntary founding leadership opportunity during Phase 1, as the organisation develops its foundations, structures, funding and operating model.

However, the intention is that the right founding leaders can have the opportunity to progress into substantive paid leadership positions as the organisation grows and the relevant funding and operational capacity are secured.

This is therefore an opportunity to get involved early, have genuine influence over the direction of the organisation and potentially grow with what you help build.

You will have the opportunity to:

• Shape the HR function from an early stage

• Work directly with the founding leadership team

• Influence organisational culture from the beginning

• Help develop an original HR model

• Build a team around the work as the organisation grows

• Contribute to something with potential beyond the organisation itself

• Establish yourself as a founding leader in an emerging model of people and organisational practice

• Progress into a paid founding leadership positionh