Recruitment for this role has now closed.
Role: Community Constellations Learning Partner
Contract: 8 months (approximately 18-22 days between July 2023 and February 2024)
Budget: £7500 including VAT
Location: Remote
Introduction
NSUN is a network of people and grassroots groups with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress and trauma. We work towards the distribution of power and resource in mental health.
Our membership includes groups of people organising themselves around shared identity, emotion and experience, in order to create spaces for care and change. NSUN’s challenge is to resource, support and build the capacity of this work in a way which honours and welcomes its variety. This work has shaped and been shaped by our recently-created Theory of Change.
Since 2021, we’ve been funded by the National Lottery Community Fund to do this capacity building work through our Community Constellations programme. Some of the ways we’ve done this include creating spaces for people who are part of user-led groups to learn from each other and develop their practice, partnering with lived experience-led organisations to deliver free training to user-led groups, and hosting projects.
The role
We are looking for a Learning Partner (a freelance consultant or an organisation) to help us answer some key questions around our National Lottery Community Fund-funded capacity- and community-building work, and to develop learning frameworks which will support our work in the future.
Our questions for this work are:
- To what extent is “capacity building” a core part of NSUN’s work, and what does this look like across different functions and teams (e.g., policy, comms, finance, operations)? What approaches do they use, and what impacts have these approaches had? How can this work shift power in the sector?
- Relational and responsive approaches have helped NSUN to carry out its capacity-building and community-building work. How can NSUN ensure that these approaches are also balanced with reliability, accessibility, fairness and transparency, and develop a flexible framework for learning from, monitoring and improving these approaches?
The person
You are someone who can support us to articulate the work we’ve been doing, spot patterns that we might otherwise miss, and whose approach to learning positions you as part of the work instead of an external observer.
You will have an understanding and commitment to anti-oppression work (particularly in relation to mental ill-health, trauma and distress), experience of undertaking monitoring, evaluation and learning work, familiarity with the UK grassroots/movement-building landscape, and the ability to build trusting relationships with a wide range of people.
NSUN is a user-led organisation, and all staff and trustees have lived experience of mental ill-health, distress or trauma, which may include racial trauma. We don’t ask people to disclose specifics during recruitment.
More information and make an expression of interest
The full brief, linked below, outlines more about NSUN and the role, as well as outlining the process of making an expression of interest.
Alternatively, click here to download the brief as a plaintext Word document.
The deadline for expressions of interest is 9:00am on Monday 5th June.
If you have any questions about this brief, or would like this document in a different format, you can email Ruairi at ruairi.white@nsun.org.uk. Questions are really welcome.