Parent Peer Support Worker (Edinburgh)
- Part time
- £24,247 – £26,646 pro-rata
- On site: Edinburgh
- Closing 7th October 2024
- Advertised from 18th September 2024
- up to 28 hours per week. Expected to be funded until 30 June 2027.
Role
Circle is a children and families charity working at the heart of communities across central Scotland. Our purpose is to improve the lives of children by strengthening families.
Circle’s approach builds on strengths, is solution focussed and uses a whole family approach to create a family environment that promotes healthy development in children.
Offering peer support across Edinburgh to parents who are affected by substance use.
We have an exciting opportunity for a committed and enthusiastic individual to join our Harbour team and be part of delivering a service for parents, children and young people affected by parental substance use in Edinburgh.
Funded by Scottish Government, and administered by Corra Foundation, our project aims to develop family inclusive practice and involve families in the development of group opportunities within the recovery community.
The post holder will work alongside families to ensure that their views and experiences inform not only their support, but wider family inclusive practice.
Applicants should be parents and have lived experience of substance use.
We offer excellent staff benefits including a competitive salary, generous pension contribution, flexible working, an employee assistance programme and generous annual leave.
We are committed to finding the right people for the jobs that we advertise.
Application notes
CLOSING DATE: Monday 7 October 2024 at 12noon
INTERVIEW DATE: Thursday 10 October 2024
An application form and job description are available from our website: circle.scot/about-us/job-vacancies or by calling 0131 552 0305.
Should you wish to have an informal chat, please contact Julie King, Project Manager, on the above number.
Circle is an Equal Opportunities employer
Scottish Charity No. SC037181 Company No. SC296943
Policy and Influencing Lead
- Full time
- £30,962 – £37,843
- Hybrid: Edinburgh
- Closing 29th November 2024
The successful post-holder will be expected to operate in line with our values which are:
Justice, Equity, Trust, Collaboration and Compassion.
Overview
OPFS was founded in 1940 and since then we have been at the forefront of shaping policy and services in Scotland, that support single parents and their children. Today, there are over 144,000 single parent families in Scotland, 25% of all families. We involve parents, champion their voices and keep their needs at the heart of everything we do.
We want a society in which single parent families are treated equally and fairly. To help achieve this we provide a range of single parent tailored services. We do this through our advice channels, self-help pages on our website and our local community-based services. To create lasting change we involve single parents, experts by experience, to influence policies which challenge discrimination and judgmental attitudes, which will reduce child poverty and make services more accessible to all families.
The Policy and Influencing Lead will play a key role in supporting OPFS to achieve its mission – to amplify the voices of single parent families in their unique role as sole carers and providers and together challenge judgemental attitudes, poverty and inequality to achieve change.
You will have a central role leading OPFS policy and influencing work, including:
- Leading on government and parliamentary focused engagement work – and to support single parent led and developed campaigns.
- Developing strong policy recommendations co-produced with single parents across the range of issues affecting single parent families.
- Utilising existing research of relevance to single parent families to support OPFS’s external messaging and forward planning.
- Developing impactful policy influencing strategies to improve the lives of single parents, by influencing the Scottish and UK Governments as well as local authorities and the general public to achieve change.
- Working collaboratively with OPFS Comms team and colleagues and stakeholders to disseminate OPFS policy and research activities.
All roles at OPFS contribute to our mission of working with and for single parent families, providing support that enables them to achieve their potential and helping to create lasting solutions to poverty and barriers facing single parents and their children. Our core values of Justice, Equity, Trust, Collaboration and Compassion are at the heart of everything we do and underpin all aspects of our work.
Equal opportunities and family friendly employment
- OPFS aims to be an equal opportunity and family friendly employer and flexible working requests will be considered. OPFS has Investors In People status and Living Wage accreditation.
Join the Early Years Service of the Multi-Cultural Family Base (MCFB) for this exciting new role of Antenatal Project Worker. Supporting ethnically diverse pregnant people, new parents and infants in the early postnatal period, you will play a transformative role in fostering early relationship and promoting positive perinatal and infant mental health.
We aim for our staff team to be representative of the families we support. We welcome applications from ethnically diverse backgrounds.
The post is funded until October 2027.
LEADING A STRONG NATIONAL CHARITY
Shared Parenting Scotland (SPS) is the expert voice in Scotland promoting parenting arrangements after separation that benefit children by trying to ensure that both parents remain fully involved in their lives.
Our telephone helpline and support meetings across Scotland help parents to stay involved after separation and provide information and support about all forms of dispute resolution including mediation, legal negotiation and court action. Each support meeting is attended by a family lawyer. Around a thousand parents contact these services every year or make use of our WhatsApp closed group chats which offer support 24/7.
Our training programme delivers two innovative programmes for separated parents.
New Ways For Families® helps parents to avoid high conflict behaviour, strengthens their abilities to make parenting decisions and communicate with their ex-partner and helps them rely less on experts and the courts to make decisions for them and their children. It is licensed by the High Conflict institute to SPS for delivery throughout the UK and we have recruited a team of freelance coaches.
Love, Loss and Living was developed by SPS in partnership with psychotherapist Jan Montgomery. It helps parents who are not seeing their children to understand and manage the grief and stress. It is now being delivered through a mixture of online course material and online or face-to-face group support sessions.
We also work to influence statutory and voluntary organisations to remove barriers to shared parenting and support parents to reach agreement rather than fight each other in court. We meet regularly with civil servants and MSPS across a range of departments and are the secretary to the Cross Party Group on Shared Parenting at the Scottish Parliament We publish a range of guides on different aspects of family law, courts and other shared parenting issues. Every summer we have hosted a student intern who undertakes a project supporting our work, such as a study of the views of young people on how parental separation affected them (Sharing My Parents), a review of developments in family courts in various countries (Learning from Abroad). In 2024 our student has worked on improving the accessibility of information about family court and dispute resolution processes and developed some new information sheets and videos for us.
We have built up links with other shared parenting organisations across the world and presented papers about our work at international conferences of the International Council on Shared Parenting and the Association of Family And Conciliation Courts.
BUILDING ON FIFTEEN YEARS OF GROWTH
The charity has been operating on a volunteer basis in Scotland for a long time, but was formalised as the Scottish project of Families Need Fathers when funding was obtained in 2010 to open a Scottish office. Families Need Fathers Scotland was registered as a separate charity and has operated independently of Families Need Fathers since 2012. The name of the charity was changed to Shared Parenting Scotland in 2020.
The current national manager Ian Maxwell and Policy Manager John Forsyth have both worked for the charity since 2010, during which time the staff has grown to six people. The new chief executive will take on the challenge of maintaining and developing the organisation at a time when the need to support separated parents and their families is even greater than in 2010.
Our vision is a Scotland in which the norm after separation will be equal sharing of responsibilities between parents and more support for children after separation.
This is an exciting time to join SPS and lead on the delivery of our training and support programmes.
The Chief Executive provides leadership for the SPS team, promoting our work to funders and stakeholders, working with other sector leaders, and helping shape developments in the sector and wider political environment.
While being an expert in family law or dispute resolution is not an essential requirement, we are looking for a leader who is interested in organisational learning and development and who cares about the outcomes for separated families.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL
We would like to hear from compelling communicators with excellent team leadership skills and the ability to build and maintain stakeholder relationships. Our ideal candidate will also be experienced in financial and strategic planning with the ability to identify opportunities for SPS to develop, thrive and continue to innovate in the years ahead. Direct experience of one or more of the main areas of work (helpline, training delivery and policy work) is necessary although it does not need to be directly related to co-parenting or family breakdown.
We welcome applicants from a range of backgrounds, including experienced managers who may be considering a CEO role for the first time.
Post Overview
The purpose of the job is to:
- Overall management of the charity, line management of staff and work with trustees.
- While the following points relate to oversight of the various working areas, within a small staff team the chief executive will also be required to take part in service delivery where necessary, to obtain or enhance an understanding of the issues faced by the people using our services.
- Financial oversight: manage existing grant funding and apply for additional grants and other funding. Preparation of annual accounts information for auditor and oversight of ongoing administration of charity income and expenditure.
- Policy oversight: work to advance the policy aims of the charity. These currently include involvement in implementation of parts of the 2020 Children (Scotland) Act, provision of better early support for separating parents including dispute resolution outside court, equality issues affecting separated parents and faster, cheaper and less complex family court processes.
- Training Oversight: manage the staff who are developing and delivering training programmes and the partnership/franchising arrangements with training agencies such as the High Conflict Institute.
- Helpline and Personal Support oversight: oversee the work of the Helpline and Support team members. Ensure that the published and online information produced by the charity is maintained and developed and the appropriate activity and outcome statistics and case studies are maintained.
- Promotion and Publicity oversight: oversee the work of the Digital Marketing and Communication Manager and any external consultants, including review of usage statistics.
Aberlour is featured in the top 100 Sunday Times big organisations Best Places to Work 2024.
About Aberlour Sycamore Children’s Houses
Aberlour Sycamore Services’ vision is to provide warm, loving homes for children where everyone learns, laughs, grows into their future and is treasured always. At any one time, the residential houses within Sycamore require additional support to help to maintain stability and balance within the teams. Sycamore services are widely recognised in Scotland for providing a range of quality therapeutic residential houses for some of the most vulnerable children and young people in the country. The Service is a national resource and as such receives referrals from throughout Scotland.
What we are looking for....
We are looking for individuals who can integrate seamlessly into our existing team, working alongside it and relief adults to support excellent service delivery. We are looking for a Residential Worker to work 37.5 hours per week on a residential rota including early, late, waken nights, sleepovers and weekend shifts. You will have a knowledge and understanding of the importance of attachment, trauma and how this can impact on an individual’s development. At times our children express their distress through their behaviour and the role can be emotionally and physically challenging; we are therefore looking for someone who is resilient, understands that behaviour is a means of communication and is trauma responsive.
You will be skilled in building therapeutic relationships with the children, young people and young adults to enable them to feel safe, loved and cared for.
You must have the ability to quickly build your relationships with the adults within the house. The nature of the role is such that you could be working to cover a shift or longer periods as required, including days and wakened nightshifts and you may also be supporting young people to attend school or participate in other learning programmes. You must therefore be able to quickly adapt to the working environment within each house.
You will be comfortable with working within Aberlour’s culture embracing respect, integrity, innovation and the ability to challenge. Demonstration of these qualities will be particularly important in this role given that you will be dipping in and out of the different teams. You must be able to be an exceptional role model for other staff and the young person.
Undertaking the role of Residential Worker will afford you the opportunity to develop and build on a range of transferrable skills which are valued in a range of employment. You will be able to demonstrate excellent flexibility and adaptability with exceptional interpersonal skills, ability to work with different teams and different children, young people and young adults living within our Sycamore Houses.
What we offer...
As well as a supportive team and excellent training opportunities, we want all our employees to feel valued and rewarded for the vital work they do. When you work with us, we'll recognise your efforts with generous annual leave, an excellent employer pension scheme and a range of deals and discounts across various retailers.
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