Senior Community and Participation Officer

ABOUT SETTLE

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 support addressing practical life skills, sustaining a tenancy and managing emotional wellbeing. Our preventative approach to homelessness helps care experienced young people to make long-lasting changes and thrive.

We’re looking to grow our delivery team with a brand new role that is responsible for processing the referrals we receive for the Settle Programme as well as holding assessment meetings as and when necessary.

The successful candidate will also be a Senior Settle Coach holding a reduced caseload and using their frontline skills to work one-to-one with care-experienced young people across London.

ABOUT THE ROLE

We’re looking for someone to join Settle in a new and exciting role, working to grow and develop our community of young people and oversee the coordination of our participation work, sometimes referred to as youth involvement or lived-experience involvement. We believe that lived experience would be particularly valuable to this role so applicants with experience of the care system are strongly encouraged to apply. Care-experienced applicants who meet the essential criteria will be guaranteed an interview (see the experience needed for this role for a clear definition of what we mean by ‘care-experienced’).

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE ROLE

Lead contact for the Settle Community

You will be the main point of contact for all things related to the Settle Community, for young people, the staff team and external stakeholders. We want the Settle Community to be a thriving space where Settle graduates build life-long connections; this role will play an instrumental role in making sure that happens. You will reach out to young people and graduates to promote opportunities and collect feedback to understand how we can make sure our offering is valuable for them. You’ll be a friendly point of contact, able to sign-post young people to useful services. You’ll also be reaching out to external organisations and services to see if there are ways we could collaborate as well as building knowledge and excitement for the Settle Community within the wider staff team at Settle.

Leading our community offer

Working closely with the Community and Programme Manager and the COO you will lead on continuing to grow and develop our Community offer. At the moment, this consists of events, workshops, 6 and 12 monthly check-in calls, and activity related to our advocacy forum. You will be responsible for developing this offer in line with what is sustainable for Settle to deliver and what is of interest to the community. Due to the small nature of the Community Team, you will need to draw on the time from the wider team and external stakeholders to deliver Community activity.

Supporting young people

Whilst you won’t be delivering our one-to-one coaching programme to the young people on the Settle Programme, you will be supporting Settle Graduates as and when concerns arise. You will be responsible for noticing when something is wrong with a young person and sharing those concerns with the relevant manager and signposting the young person on for further support. That may be additional support through Settle or external support, depending on the concern. If a safeguarding need is highlighted for a young person, you will be responsible for ensuring the necessary steps are taken ahead of events to ensure that everyone is safe.

Collecting impact data and evidencing impact

You’ll be meticulous in ensuring you collect and report high quality data at our events and in check-in calls with graduates. You’ll understand that this information is crucial to demonstrating our impact to funders and partners. You’ll ensure your notes and our databases are up to date with accurate information. You’ll act as the lead for data and impact for the Community Team, leading on projects
within this area as and when needed. You’ll also actively highlight any stories and feedback that help to demonstrate our impact and share these with the wider team.

Collaborating with key stakeholders
We are a small organisation and the Community work crosses over with other areas, meaning there are plenty of opportunities to collaborate. This could be helping our communications team to create quality content for our community newsletter or social media or sharing insights with the fundraising team. You will be responsible for building relationships with other organisations and experts in
community building and participation to ensure that our work is at the forefront of best practice.

Coordinating our participation work
At Settle we are proud of our growing participation work and this role will take a leading role in ensuring this runs as smoothly as possible. Lived experience participation is a shared responsibility across the team. However, there are times when you will coordinate contacting appropriate young people, as well as building a network of young people who want to be involved in a range of opportunities. Recent opportunities include:

• Participating in assessment exercises for staff recruitment.
• Contributing perspectives and insights from lived experience at our Board / SLT Away Day.
• Meeting potential and existing funders to share stories and feedback about working with Settle.
• Media interviews

Supporting our advocacy forum
You will be responsible for the coordination of a monthly advocacy forum (held either online or in person), working with young people and staff to agree the agenda, encourage attendance, facilitate sessions and capture the outputs. You will support members of the advocacy forum to develop and take campaign actions, attending relevant events to provide additional support to the young people involved as and when needed. Recently, this included a meeting with a group of MPs and Lords to talk about our campaign. You will also work with colleagues from our communications team to support young people to generate campaign content and engage with external stakeholders to source additional support for the continued development of the forum.

Safeguarding
At Settle, safeguarding the young people we support is everyone’s responsibility no matter your role. You will therefore have safeguarding training and responsibilities relevant to your role and the contact you will have with the young people we support.

CANDIDATE REQUIREMENTS

Essential 

We are looking for a compassionate and collaborative individual who has previously led or been involved in community organising or the development and management of communities of interest and shared action. You will have a good understanding of the needs of care experienced young people and will feel comfortable managing risk and safeguarding concerns to ensure that the young people you are working with receive high quality support. You’ll feel comfortable working with people from a range of backgrounds and will enjoy building relationships with colleagues and organisations outside the direct Settle team. You are a great connector, able to draw connections between the stakeholders you are building relationships with to source opportunities for the different ways they could engage with the Settle Community and the wider organisation. You will utilise creative thinking to ensure our community offer is engaging and of
value to the Settle Community. You will be comfortable leading projects independently or as part of a small team. You’ll be able to help others spot opportunities to involve young people in their own areas of work and provide high quality support to enable this. You’ll be looking for a role where you can support an exciting and growing community to deliver and achieve great things. You will want a varied role where no day is the same, and to support this you will be highly organised and be able to balance competing priorities, drawing on others for support when needed.

What we’re looking for:

• You are passionate about community building and have effective methods and ideas for developing a thriving community.
• You are interested in power and want to explore ways that Settle could share power with the Settle Community to develop the community further.
• You enjoy and are good at running events and workshops.
• You have a strong understanding of the experiences the Settle Graduates may have had and can use this understanding to help you build a strong community offer as well as provide support to young people when needed.
• You are confident to lead work independently and make decisions, have a strong work ethic and are flexible to changing priorities.
• You’re an excellent relationship builder and able to build strong relationships with young people, and key external and internal stakeholders.
• You’re impact driven, understand the power of data and stories and know how to use them to support our work.
• You have a reflective and open approach to work, open to feedback and keen to put learning into action and support team development.
• You have excellent verbal, and written communications skills.
• You are dedicated to embedding equality, diversity and inclusion into all areas of your work.
• You have an excellent understanding of safeguarding and are committed to keeping safeguarding at the centre of your work.

To view the full job description please click here – >Senior_Community_and_Participation_Officer

Start date:  April 2026 (or sooner).

Hours: Full-time or 4-5 days per week.

Location: Hybrid working between our office in London Bridge, delivering events across London and working from home.