Chief Executive

About the role:

Kinship is in our third year of delivering the first national peer support service for kinship carers in England. We are looking for a new Associate Director of Peer Support and Community to build and develop our model and to take the team to the next phase of growth and impact.

Your first priority will be to oversee delivery of the Department for Education national Peer Support Service contract in England. You will lead the development of our hub and spoke model, with an enhanced offer of national resources and support together with a continued focus on on-the-ground support for kinship carers to set up and sustain a network of peer support groups. You will ensure all members of the team have clarity and are empowered to meet new targets and ways of working.

The role will also lead on the strategic development of peer support approaches in Wales (for which we are seeking funding), ensuring innovation and good practice is shared across the nations.

Kinship peer support groups are powerful levers for change in local, regional and national ecosystems. Your team will ensure that every kinship carer in England and Wales has access to a peer support group, or support to set up and create their own. The team will be purposeful about offering developmental support to all kinship peer support groups, including independent groups, ensuring they remain or become sustainable. And that they have resources, training and peer networks to support this.

Reflecting our strategic focus on developing our Kinship Community of more than 10,000 kinship carers across England and Wales, you will lead a new community strategy, co-ordinating the development of opportunities for community connection and community power. This will include taking leadership for developing the Kinship model of community engagement and integrating across all our ‘in person’ and digital services and activities.

You will ensure a collaborative approach with services, alignment with national and local campaigning activity, and work closely with marketing and communications colleagues to support kinship carer reach and engagement with our community offer.

We’re taking an integrated approach to our services, so you’ll collaborate well across teams to ensure that support groups and their leaders have easy access to high quality advice, information and training. The team will need to work closely with colleagues delivering our new training and support contract, funded by the Department for Education.

Key responsibilities include:

• Innovation of the Peer Support Service.

• Develop and rollout peer support and community strategy and operational plan. 

• Implement monitoring and evaluation and impact tools for timely and accurate reporting of activity and engagement.

• Work with the Development team to develop proposals for the community and peer support which are ready for fundraising and business development.

Essential requirements include:

• Substantial experience in scaling a national service or programme with high quality outputs. This includes overseeing delivery, strategic planning, budgeting, managing delivery, meeting KPIs, stakeholder engagement and reporting to funders.

• Experience of governance and managing risk on high profile service delivery.

• Experience of effective budget management.

• Significant experience of leading the development and delivery of peer support services.

Key dates:

• Deadline - 9am on Monday 10 June 2024
• 1st interview - Friday 14 June 2024 (online) - TBC
• 2nd interview - Tuesday 18 June 2024 (in-person) - TBC

How to apply:

We will ask you for your CV and to respond to the following five questions via the Applied platform. Please note that all answers will be viewed anonymously by reviewers and CVs will not be viewed until after this sift has happened. This is the first opportunity to demonstrate your experience and to stand out in the recruitment process. Reviewers will not see all your answers together until the end and will be marking on the strength of the response to each question. You will have max 250 words per answer.

Questions for application (along with CV):

1.      Outline why you want to work at Kinship in this role, and how your values align to the Kinship ones? Please include a bit about your experience in this section.

2.      Please give one example of when you have had to develop from scratch OR innovate a national service. Please include what the service budget was, what you did and what the outcome was.

3.      This service is a high-profile contract, funded by the Department for Education.  Targets and SLAs need to be met while providing impact for kinship carers. Please give a previous example of how you’ve delivered and met targets with high quality outputs.

4.      You’ll be leading a team who has been through a restructure, with new staff starting and a new model to develop and embed. You will need to work at pace, while providing strong leadership and clarity to the team. How would you approach the first three months, what will you prioritise and what will you need?

5.      Given the strategic ambition of Kinship, the context in which we work and this role as Associate Director of Peer Support and Community, where do you see the opportunities and risks for the service in the next 1-2 years? How would you prepare or mitigate them?