Director of People

Groundswell is a sector leader in participation, and our culture is built around the fact that over 65% of our staff have lived experience of homelessness or related experience. Our organisation benefits from a huge range of lived and learned experience and skills, and prides itself on ensuring our people and their experience and skills are at the heart of our organisation’s culture, delivery, and development. 

We are at a very exciting point in our development. Our organisation has grown substantially over the last five years, to a staff team of over 40 people, growing from being London-based to having staff across England, and the world-wide transition from purely office-based to hybrid working for most staff members. We are continuing our journey to be trauma-informed and people-focused across our teams and work and are currently working towards the Lived Experience Charter. We are now developing our next three-year strategy, where investing in our core and our people is a key priority. 

This is an exciting opportunity for someone who wants to develop their HR and people management approaches in a truly pioneering organisation, where lived experience and participation are key priorities. We’re looking for someone who has a solid grounding in employment good practice and legislation but is able to work to adapt policies and procedures to being person-centred and trauma-informed. We need someone who understands and recognises that ‘standard practice’ isn’t always the most equitable solution.  Often, we need to be flexible and adapt usual practice to make sure we're meaningfully making the organisation accessible to staff who may well be in recovery, neuro-divergent, over-coming past trauma and so on.  

Candidates with experience of social exclusion due to homelessness, imprisonment, migration or otherwise being part of a marginalised population, who meet the specification, will be given priority access.