Head of Toolkit

Head of Toolkit

Reports to:             Director of Knowledge

Salary:                    £60,000    

Location:                Central London

About the Youth Endowment Fund

The Youth Endowment Fund is a bold new attempt to put early intervention at the heart of efforts to tackle youth offending.

In recent years violent crime has risen significantly. Homicides, assaults, robberies and offences involving weapons have all seen sustained growth. We have also seen large increases in violent crime involving children and young people. This is a tragedy. Every child captured in these numbers is an important member of our community and society has a duty to protect them.

The Youth Endowment Fund is a charity with a £200m endowment and a mission that matters. Founded by youth charity Impetus and its partners the Early Intervention Foundation and the Social Investment Business, we exist to prevent children and young people from getting caught up in violent crime. We do this by finding the very best ways to prevent youth violence, funding great initiatives and working to scale them up and spread great ideas.

Making this happen is a massive challenge. We will only succeed if we build a fantastic body of knowledge about youth violence and make it very accessible. Central to this will be a highly accessible evidence repository that shows what works to reduce youth violence and what doesn’t. This website – which we call a ‘toolkit’ – will summarise, in a highly accessible way, decades of academic research.

It is your job to make this toolkit a reality.

Key responsibilities

Most fundamentally, your job is to ensure that the Youth Endowment Fund builds and maintains a high quality, highly accessible and highly up to date body of research. This will include leading the production of a Toolkit that shows what works and what doesn’t in reducing youth violence and our wider evidence synthesis function.

To achieve this, you will:

Lead on content production for the toolkit by designing and overseeing how we synthesise and summarise existing evidence into accessible information on, if specific practices and interventions are effective in reducing youth violence

Build and maintain a highly effective working relationship with external stakeholders and partners

Ensure that the design of the Toolkit is highly accessible and user friendly. To do this you will commission and work with an external design agency. You will ensure that we make fantastic decisions about the best way to present information so that people tell others how useful and insightful the Toolkit is and how helpful they have found it in making decisions about how to spend money on reducing youth violence.

Working with a senior researcher, review and write content for the Toolkit that is 100% plain English. You will make it your mission to ensure that only easy-to-understand content is on the website and that things are written with incredible clarity.

Listen hard to the priority audiences for the Toolkit so that you know how you can always be looking to improve it. You will build a real understanding of how Violence Reduction Units, Police and Crime Commissioners, Mayoral Combined Authorities, Local Authorities, Whitehall and Welsh Government officials and Youth Sector umbrella bodies think and make decisions.

Ensure that all of our work at the Youth Endowment Fund is informed by the cutting-edge knowledge that you are building. You will time work for the toolkit and wider synthesis work so that it can best inform new funding rounds so that we can always have the best possible understanding of what the existing evidence says.

As a senior member of staff in the organisation you will also:

• Build and lead your team, providing clear direction, agility, high-quality outputs and a culture where it is natural to perform well and support colleagues brilliantly.
• Support leading the organisation as a senior staff member helping to inform the strategy, deliver results and build and model the culture that we need to succeed.

About you

You are this sort of person:

You have led teams that produced high quality and highly accessible research. You have led a team that was very well respected for the quality of research that it produced and the impact that that research had. The outputs your team produced rarely just sat on a shelf. They were discussed, debated and led to change happening.

You will have a post-graduate (Masters or PhD) qualification. This is in a relevant field such social science, social policy, public health, health services or other field, with a significant quantitative component, or relevant experience equivalent to Masters qualification.

You write in a way that people easily understand. You have that rare skill of writing in plain English. You avoid jargon. If something is complicated, you are good at explaining it.

You will have significant technical expertise in evidence synthesis  and evaluation methods. This will include RCTs, QEDs, and knowledge and experience of evidence synthesis approaches such as metanalyses and systematic reviews. You will combine this with experience of communicating complex evidence and analysis in a simple and accessible format to non-experts.

You are very at ease with data : You are highly numerate and very comfortable working with complex data sets and advanced analytical techniques.

You learn fast but remain humble. You are very quick at getting your head around things. You like learning. You are very good at synthesising information. You know how much you don't know. You know that you can learn more. You know that it's easy to assume you know when you don't. You care more that good things happen than who gets the credit. You are a great and supportive team player.

You are fascinated and thoughtful on how people engage with information. You have the cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence and experience to find the ways to make present information so that people find it engaging, use it, recommend it to others and return to it. You understand why people resist making evidence-based decisions. You come alive talking about to make information and evidence really accessible so that people change what they do.

You are an excellent strategic thinker. People say that you are good at seeing the big picture. You have experience of wrestling into place a strategy for a project or organisation. You are good at thinking logically but you are also creative. You have ideas but are happy rejecting a lot of them. You like seeing things from different points of view.

You don't want your days to pass without making a difference. You want to play a significant part in reducing the level of youth violence.

You are at ease with policy makers. You are very comfortable and experienced talking to and exploring policies with policy makers whether junior civil servants, senior civil servants, or advisers. You are very effective in these conversations

You are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion. You believe and act in a way that celebrates and encourages a range of experiences, views and values.

While it is not a criterion, we are especially interested to hear from applicants who have lived experience of youth violence.

It is also important to us that the people we hire do not discriminate. We believe in being inclusive and giving everyone an equal chance to succeed. Applications are welcome from all regardless of age, sex, gender identity, disability, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, race, sexual orientation, transgender status or social economic background.

To apply

To apply, please send a CV, cover letter and the monitoring form from our careers page to recruitment@youthendowmentfund.org.uk by midnight, 12^th July 2020.

You should also include the contact details of two referees, one of whom must be your current or most recent employer. Referees will only be approached with your express permission. You will also be required to provide proof of your eligibility to work in the UK. As part of our commitment to flexible working we will consider a range of options for the successful applicant. All options can be discussed at interview stage.

First round interviews will take place in the week commencing Monday 20^th July 2020.

Second round interviews will take place in the week commencing Monday 27^th July 2020.

Due to the large number of applications we receive, it is not possible to write to you should you not be shortlisted. If you have not heard from us within three weeks of the closing date, please assume that your application has not been successful on this occasion.

Your personal data will be shared for the purposes of the recruitment exercise. This includes our HR team, interviewers (who may include other partners in the project and independent advisors), relevant team managers and our IT service provider if access to the data is necessary for performance of their roles. We do not share your data with other third parties, unless your application for employment is successful and we make you an offer of employment. We will then share your data with former employers to obtain references for you. We do not transfer your data outside the European Economic Area.