Are you the Youth Project Mangager we’re looking for?

Role Profile

Let’s start with the expected bits of the role profile, just so we all know the basics 

Reporting to: CEO 

Responsible for: Development and Delivery of youth work provision

Location: Cumbria wide (and WFH, ARC HQ, Flexible)

Salary: £36,000.00

Why do we need this role? 

Anti Racist Cumbria exists to make Cumbria an anti-racist county. That’s our aim. If we’re serious about doing that we need everyone (or more people than not) to want that too, and to work with us to make that happen. And yes, that means we need the young people who live here to be a part of that too. 

Some young people are activists, some young people are just getting on with life in whatever way they can, some young people don’t see the point of anti-racism work, others sadly encounter racism on a regular or daily basis and some young people even have racist views, sometimes openly. All young people live in a system where racism is hidden in plain sight, but they can’t always see it. Even if it affects them. Whoever and wherever they are in our county, we want to reach them where they are at and from there, see where that takes them and us in relation to our aim. 

What does the role involve? 

Think about it like this; here’s Cumbria. 

Imagine youth work projects all over this county: 

1 & 2 – Cockermouth & Whitehaven in the west 

3 – Carlisle and Penrith in the north 

4 – the Furness Peninsula encapsulating Barrow, Ulverston, Dalton 

5 – the national park including Keswick, Windermere, Ambleside  

Now imagine you engaging with young people, deciding what seeds to plant.

Those seeds are planted and nurtured into shoots by you and your team of youth workers; then into living growing plants that are fed and watered by young people all over the county. 

Your job isn’t to run the projects, although there might be some of that at the the start whilst you get things moving (there’s more about that below), your job is to manage them via actions like:

• setting them up
• scoping the costings to enable them to happen 
• working out where the money for this will come from
• figuring out what the team to run them needs to look like
• recruiting the young people to be part of them

You’re not a youth worker, you’re a manager of projects that are driven by youth workers and led by young people.

The map above doesn’t really give you a perspective of the size of our beautiful county and working across the whole of it isn’t always going to be straightforward (!) but it is going to be needed! Getting started will mean going out there to meet young people where they’re at and finding out what they want, then figuring out how to bring them to life by working with a team of youth workers (more about them below too!) and in turn, young people. 

That’s a tough job. Young people want what they want, and rightly so. But how are the projects going to involve an anti-racist slant and why do they need to? 

Did we say our county is big? Well so is the variety of young people who live here; like those from rural farming backgrounds, or from underserved and financially deprived backgrounds, or ones who have moved here more recently with parents seeking work in our hospitals and care services, or ones who are struggling with their identity. Any or all of these young people could be Black, Brown, white, they could be gay, straight, trans, they might be neurodivergent or disabled, they might identify as male, female or non-binary and they might think TikTok is sic and Facebook is lame and argue that it’s ok to use the N word because it’s in hip hop songs. 

What we’re saying is that as Youth Projects Manager you’re going to need a lot of skills in your toolkit (or rucksack if you prefer) to be able to deliver. And we are keen on delivery. It’s expected. And that brings us nicely to the next section. 

We hope you are still with us. 

Context of the Post

Main duties and responsibilities

Your job will be to build and coordinate projects that the young people want to do in creative ways, and to ensure that the projects meet our aim of becoming an anti-racist county. 

There is a current team of part time, self employed youth workers who do not work set hours or set days, so a big part of your job will be to work out what you need in terms of people and resources for projects, then work to deliver on that. The projects that you’re overseeing are with, and for, young people, so sessions will naturally take place during evenings, possibly at weekends, during school holidays and sometimes overnight (residentials) in a variety of settings. So you will need to be prepared for varied and often unsociable hours when projects are forming and during their life spans.

It’s also important to understand that although this is a project management role, initially as you start out, it will inevitably involve meeting and engaging with lots of young people. As projects begin to be created you’ll therefore need to be a key part of the delivery team and working directly with the young people. That means you will be delivering for a while as you get things off the ground, but longer term we envision you stepping back from direct delivery once things are up and running smoothly. So if working directly with young people is NOT your thing, even for a short period of time, this isn’t the role for you. Equally if working directly with young people and ONLY working directly with young people is your bag, again this job isn’t for you. 

You will need:

• the ability to manage a team of youth workers and build a foundation based on what good teamwork looks like. You will need to figure out who your team are, what skills they have or don’t have and what they will and can do: whilst assessing what else you might need in terms of support to develop your projects, including further recruitment of staff and volunteers
• to be able to work evenings, weekends and during school holidays yourself and take part in residentials too 
• to get to know the young people who are already involved in ARC youth projects (we have Young Black ARCtivists/TikTok project running at the moment and our Living Whilst Black Youth project is currently on hold but we’d like to see that reinstated in whatever way they young people would like). You’ll find out more about them and develop a relationship with them, as well as strengthening their relationships with the existing youth work team 
• to spend a good amount of your time scoping, exploring and investigating to begin to find out what’s already out there, who is doing what, where and how, and to form new relationships across broad spectrums of Cumbria’s young people 
• to support a programme of projects, ensuring anti-racism is embedded throughout, but at the same time remembering that projects need to engage and meet young people where they are at – with an asset-based approach that puts them at the centre of the work, not a ‘this is what we’re doing’ one. Your job is to ensure you and your team amplify their voices, voices which often go unheard or un-listened to, it’s not be their voice per se
• to recognise that it’s also important to ensure that whilst the ARC youth programme places young people first, there is no adultification here, projects are youth led, informative, challenging…and fun. 
• to bear in mind that all of this is going to take money, so you will need to apply for small funding pots (and manage the budgets for these yourself) and with the support of the CEO, apply for larger funding pots which you will manage along with the Digital and Ops Manager
• to recognise that your team will look to you for safeguarding and welfare of children responsibilities, so you will need to know what your duties are, stay up to date yourself and ensure you keep your youth work team up to date too. You’ll also need to think about how you deal with issues that might arise during projects and sessions delivering on projects 
• to monitor, record and evaluate work and provide reports and information as required in order to ensure a consistently high quality provision and demonstrate the impact of the projects you are managing.
• to be aware of and adhere to Anti Racist Cumbria policies and procedures, in particular Safeguarding and racial trauma awareness.

That’s a lot to do isn’t it? And it isn’t an exhaustive list, so we want to manage your expectations from the start – it’s a big job! Check the person specification below to see if you have the managerial skills needed for this job. 

Person Specification

You will need to be extremely passionate about anti-racism; we are under no illusions that engaging in anti-racist practice exposes activists (and you will need to be an activist) to an increasingly profound awareness of white supremacy, structural racism and other intersecting structured systems of inequity (i.e. sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism). As such you’ll need to evidence and demonstrate your own anti-racist journey. 

Passion about this work isn’t enough on its own; you need to believe in young people and what they bring to the party, and you need to be creative and high achieving (but not necessarily in a qualifications way). To be our Youth Project Manager you should be knowledgeable and have the following qualities, skills and experience:

Knowledge 

• Understanding of national and local anti-racist groups and other initiatives

• Demonstrable knowledge of Health and Safety and Safeguarding best practice and how these relate to young people and staff within ARC
• Knowledge of factors affecting lives of young people

Qualities

• A strong and passionate commitment to anti-racism.
• Strong commitment to young people and ability to engage and build positive and professional relationships with all kinds of young people – (just because you are not always directly working with young people doesn’t mean you don’t engage with them, and that engagement needs to be a positive experience for all)
• Strong commitment to an asset based approach and have the creative drive to bring your team (and in turn young people) with you and with us
• Patience, flexibility, resilience and an ability to be resourced both emotionally and physically to do this work (with ARC’s regular wellbeing support topping this up)

Skills

• Strong project management skills 
• Along with the knowledge of factors affecting lives of young people (under Knowledge above) in our communities, the ability to provide reliable support to them and your team in times of stress
• Ability to design and implement high quality projects with your youth work team and young people
• Strong planning skills which enable you to plan and prioritise competing tasks, work at a fast pace, support multiple projects simultaneously and set realistic targets 
• Ability to communicate confidently with a wide range of people and organisations using platforms that work for your audience 
• Ability to identify and challenge racism and other intersectional and discriminatory behaviors, taking appropriate action as necessary.
• Ability to monitor, evaluate and report using a wide range of information and research to inform and measure your understanding  and outcomes  
• Ability to coach or mentor others and bring out the best in them
• Strong IT skills (emails, googledrive, sheets, docs), smart phone camera and basic pic editing
• Ability to keep accurate, confidential and up-to-date work records, in line with our policies and procedures
• Ability to work independently to deliver projects and specific pieces of work
• Ability to work as part of a team
• Ability to listen and to understand (even if you don’t agree with)  the perspective and views of others 

Experience of

• Working with Black and Brown global majority communities
• Anti-racist initiatives
• Managing team or staff members 
• Project management 
• Working with young people both in groups and individually.
• Liaising with collaborative partners to deliver quality work.
• Experience of working effectively with a wide range of stakeholders, both locally, countywide and nationally 
• Supporting young people who are disaffected, underachieving and/or have social/emotional barriers to participation.
• Working with volunteers and community partners
• Face to face grass roots delivery
• Residential work
• Project Budget management 
• Funding applications (whether small or large)
• Promoting, reaching and engaging with young people through avenues such as social media 

General

This is a full time permanent role (subject to funding) and that means whilst we are contracted to work 40 hours a week, like many full time contracts, we sometimes have no choice but to work more hours than this in order to get the work done. That means the work and this role can (and does) involve working some unsocial hours. As we’ve said before, particularly with youth work provision there will be evenings, weekends and school holidays. Whilst we are a flexible bunch and we don’t want to get all white supremacy ‘corporate’ on ourselves and start counting every hour and taking an hour back for any worked over 40 in a week, we get it when you say you won’t be in Friday afternoon and we don’t expect an essay explaining why. In fact, we’ll encourage you to take the whole damn day instead. 

We do need you to have an enhanced DBS certificate which is in accordance with our Child Protection and Safeguarding procedures, but if you haven’t got one and you get the job, we will organise this. We’re just letting you know you can’t do the job without one. 

I know we’ve mentioned it’s a big county a couple of times now, but a big part of your job is being able to engage with people and move around the whole county. In reality, it’s not just a big part of your job, it’s an essential part of it (as is pounding the pavements) and whilst we get that not everyone wants to drive these days, you’re going to have to work really hard to convince us that you can do the job without a full driving license and a car and you’ll need to be able to manage our county’s windy and often narrow roads and our wonderful weather! 

And finally…you will be working in a Black led organisation and we want to see more Black people, Brown people and people from under-represented groups in our growing and positive team. Anyone who joins ARC will be supported in an anti-racist environment with a fantastic network of volunteers and a Board of Trustees from a wide range of backgrounds; age, economic, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, heritage and cultures. 

The above duties are not intended to be an exhaustive list, but a good and honest indication of the requirements of this post.  Naturally duties may be varied from time to time to reflect the changing needs of an organisation that is in service to its county and making it an anti-racist one.

Benefits and Entitlements 

This is a full-time permanent role (subject always to funding) – £36,000.00 (gross) per annum.

• Hybrid office/home working/ flexible working environment.
• 36 days annual leave including Bank Holidays.
• Statutory sick pay.
• Employers pension scheme contributions.
• Regular well-being and wellness support.

How to apply 

Please submit a statement, maximum of two sides of A4 pages, detailing your project management experience and why you meet the skills and qualities needed and the experience required for this role. Please also send your CV to demonstrate your previous work roles that evidence the skills, qualities and experience you have outlined.

Send both documents to hello@antiracistcumbria.org    

If you would prefer to give your statement in another format, please contact us to discuss.

Closing date 

6.00pm  19th July

Process 

1. Pre-interview 

After sifting, those we are considering taking forward for interview will be invited to a brief chat over zoom on the 26th July about what we are looking for so we can all be really sure we are on the same page. If that goes well we will invite you to the interview stage

2. Interviews

Will take place on Monday 5th Aug at our HQ in Ambleside and will involve an interview panel and a task which you will be left alone to complete and then asked questions on. More details will be provided if you are invited to interview. 

Please ensure you are available for the interview date if you decide to apply for this post as we are unable to change the date to accommodate external factors. We will inform you if you are called for an interview no later than 5pm on Monday 22nd July and standard rate/class travel expenses will be reimbursed.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions ahead of applying. Not sure if it’s the right role for you….ask! Could it mean you relocating to the most beautiful (and actively becoming anti-racist) county? Let us know, we could support you with that!

We look forward to hearing from you.