The Youth Endowment Fund
Assistant Director of Public Affairs and Partnerships
Reports to: Director of Change, with significant engagement with Director of Public Affairs and Comms and CEO
Salary: £75,500 per annum
Location: Central London or Hybrid
Contract: 2-year fixed term potential to extend. Open to 0.8 FTE for the right candidate
Closing date: Friday 26th September by 12pm
About the Youth Endowment Fund
We re here to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice. Last year, 244 people in England and Wales tragically died after being assaulted with a knife. Of these, 32 were children. Every child captured in these numbers is an important member of our community and society has a duty to protect them. Even when violence doesn t strike directly, we know that the fear of violence has a terrible effect on children s lives.
The Youth Endowment Fund exists to try and permanently change things. To succeed, we must build an exceptional body of knowledge about violence affecting young people and how we reduce it. This knowledge has to be both rigorous and highly relevant to those making decisions about how to support vulnerable young people. We need to find out what works and what doesn t through evidence synthesis, data analysis and qualitative research into children s lives. We need to convert this into highly accessible content on what works, how delivery organisations need to change their practice and how the systems they operate in need to be reformed. We then need to work with the right people that can make change happen, across systems, policies and practice, to have a real impact on reducing violence affecting children s lives.
We can t do this alone, we have to build and maintain brilliant partnerships across government, with other funders and with wider society. We are looking for an exceptional individual to lead on this work. We also need to have an eye for the future. Our present endowment must be spent down by April 2029. We need someone who can lead on planning for the future.
Key responsibilities
You ensure that we:
Are ready for the future: Born with a ten-year endowment, the YEF has become the leading authoritative voice on how to reduce violence affecting children.We mustspend down this endowment by April 2029, so need to start thinking about after this date. You will lead on ensuring we have a great plan for post 2029. You will spot the best opportunities, assess them and, over time, take them. This includes both building great external relationships and also ensuring there s a clearly articulated, inspiring narrative filled with facts, examples and case studies - of what has been delivered to date and what needs to happen between 2029 and 2039 to double down on our mission. To do this, you will orchestrate the expertise and knowledge of colleagues across the organisation ensuring that what you need comes together perfectly.
Build and maintain great relationships across government: We have an increasingly large number of relationships across government providing advice and support on what works to prevent violence. You will be ready to offer advice to colleagues on those relationships where needed. You will build new relationships and maintain them where they are needed so we are ready for the future. You will be really well organised too ensuring that internal colleagues know which relationships they own and making sure that key regular meetings are in place. We have a simple process that tracks these relationships; you will make this process work well for us with minimum bureaucracy and maximum effectiveness. You will also provide help and advice and coaching as YEF colleagues think through how best to get system changes to happen that will ultimately reduce violence.
Build great relationships with other organisations that will be key to the future: As thelead organisation on reducing violence affecting young people, we increasingly receive and see a host of opportunities to partner with other organisations including funders on projects, co-funding and research. You will support this work leading on relationships that are essential in making us ready for the future. You will spot the opportunity, build relationships, bring in other YEF colleagues, pull together key information, write brilliant documents where needed, win others over. In short, you will make great things happen.
As a senior member of staff in the organisation you also:
- Lead on culture: Build and maintain a culture where it is natural to perform well and support colleagues brilliantly.
- Deliver on strategy: Contribute to setting the strategy, delivering results, and building and modelling the culture that we need to succeed.
About you
You are this sort of person:
You make things happen. You re organised, delivery-focused, and produce high-quality work, even under pressure. You work independently and to a high standard. You are quick at really understanding something so you can make good decisions quite fast. You put plans together and make them happen. Wherever you work, people think of you as someone who makes things happen. You do it in a generous, kind way that means people are feel delighted to see you succeeding, never trampled upon.
You like bringing order and clarity to a big project that involves lots of people. You are at home bringing order to a big project: working out who is going to do what by when, having a regular steering group to ensure progress, keeping everyone on side and delivering a great result at the end.
You understand how government works as in really understand. You understand the nuance of how decisions are made within government. You understand that there is no such thing as the department s position (instead there are different views competing) and that while some decisions are very rational, some are more about personalities and politics. You find the process of how decisions get made within government departments, and with Number 10 and the Treasury, fascinating.
You are fantastic at spotting how to get something done in Whitehall or Westminster. You are really good at thinking about how to make change happen. To some, Westminster and Whitehall can seem like a blob but you are brilliant at spotting how to make change happen there. You can think through the intricacies of who to get onside, who to get advice from, who to persuade and how to get the job done. You have a track record of doing this.
You write really well. The idea of writing one or two pivotally important longer documents (30-40 pages) for the organisation that makes the case for something and pulls in content from lots of colleagues, synthesising and making it all fit together sounds interesting. You know from experience that you would be good at it.
You win people over. People tend to warm to you and respect you. You easily build good relationships with both very senior and very junior people. You can be at ease talking to a senior politician or a 15 year old. It is important to you to be humble. You acknowledge how much you don't know as well as how much you do.
You are great at building lasting partnerships with other organisations. Youhave experienceof building partnerships or collaborations with other organisations, winning them over, doing conflict well when you need to, communicating clearly so that the work gets done and people feel as good as possible about it.
You are a team player. You work brilliantly in a team. You are not motivated by being the individual winner. You want the team as a whole to succeed. You enjoy coaching other people so that they perform excellently in a meeting. You are not possessive of your contacts. You don t care who gets the credit as long as things get done. You like the idea of being part of a small, well-motivated team and are ok with the downside of this that we don t have a lot of junior admin staff to do the jobs we like less.
You think and communicate really well from the big picture to practical reality. You re a strategic thinker who can see the big picture without losing sight of the detail. You find it quite easy to summarise in a few sentences, a few pages or a few words a complex argument or case. Whether speaking or writing, you break down complicated concepts in ways that make sense to different audiences without oversimplifying. You bring clarity where others bring jargon.
You care about our mission. You can be easily motivated to do work to prevent violence. This is something that matters to you.You believe in getting people to do things that are most likely to save lives, rather than just things that sound good.
You re committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion. Not just in theory but in how you work, who you listen to, and what you prioritise.
While it s not a criterion, we are especially interested to hear from applicants who have lived experience of violence affecting young people.
It s 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.
Secondments
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