St Mary’s Community Centre, Bramall Lane, Sheffield S2 4QZ Partnership Development Officer.
TimeBuilders is an innovative and asset based approach to building stronger and more resilient people and communities. The new post of partnership development officer will enable us to build on our early success and to help transform communities across Sheffield.
Background:
We need to work to make our communities healthy, happy and productive places to live. We want to build relationships, to make our streets beautiful, to provide safe and playful spaces for our children to grow up in. This sort of work transforms communities and creates happiness. But it doesn’t create financial wealth and so in times of austerity it doesn’t happen.
On the other hand our communities are full of people who are looking for worthwhile work to do and who have the time and skills to do it. But time hangs heavy on their hands because there is no money to employ them. There is a gap.
TimeBuilders bridges this gap. It does it by using the things we already have: unused assets that already exist within communities.
Unused assets
People: their time and skills.
People from all walks of life are members of TimeBuilders: retired professionals, students, people living with mental health difficulties, people who are newly arrived in Sheffield, people who like gardening or cooking or making things, refugees, people who like to get to know other people. What they have in common is the desire and ability to do useful work to improve their communities.
Downtime and spare capacity
Most leisure organisations such as football clubs, theatres and leisure centres have times of spare capacity particularly during off peak hours. Empty seats, swimming pools and gyms are unused assets.
Surplus food
Despite the best efforts of the food industry there is always food that is destined to be wasted. This is an asset which our members use to run weekly cafes in various locations across the city – combatting both social isolation and food poverty.
TimeBuilders puts these assets to work. We identify work that needs to be done in the community: running family playschemes, cooking and serving surplus food, making urban gardens, organising social events, clearing litter from streets or running groups where people share their skills and knowledge with each other. Members earn Time Credits for each hour building the community in this way.
Time Credits can then be spent on rewards such as tickets donated by leisure organisations, coach trips, and meals in the Food Hub café at St Mary’s so that people earn something for their effort – they can take their kids swimming, or go to the theatre or a football match.
In these ways TimeBuilders creates the social networks that create and maintain well-being.
TimeBuilders is growing fast. After two years operation members are earning nearly 11,000 Time Credits a year and reporting huge improvements in their well-being. We are replicating TimeBuilder hubs with partners in different parts of the city. The implications for how health and social care are delivered in Sheffield are clear and we have ambitious plans for growth and are planning to achieve the following by 2018.
Fifteen TimeBuilder cafes using surplus food with 500 members involved in local TimeBuilder activities.
Ten learning hubs in different areas of Sheffield where 200 people will learn English and other skills for living.
Regular social events such as Family Activity Days and Beyond Beauty in fifteen areas of Sheffield, particularly targeting socially isolated people.
Sixty growing containers producing food on wasteland in Sheffield.
3 workshops across Sheffield where 60 people make useful and beautiful things out of rubbish.
A key driver of this work is a sufficient number of attractive and relevant spending opportunities to motivate and incentivise members.
TimeBuilder partnership development officer
Your job is to develop spending opportunities that drive the TimeBuilders process. You will do this by creating a network of corporate partners who understand and believe in the TimeBuilders project and want to donate to it. We envisage 2 categories of partner.
1.Asset partners
We already have a number of spending partners who give us tickets for the downtime in their organisations including: Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield Theatres, Sheffield International Venues. Their support is vital so we need to strengthen our relationship with them as well as developing new partnerships.
2.Sponsor partners
We also want to develop partnerships with organisations who do not have a downtime asset as part of their business, but do have the capacity to donate cash to sponsor an annual or twice yearly coach trip, or trip to Edale. Our experience is that many corporate partners like the TimeBuilders ethos because it enables people to contribute, rather than to simply receive charity.
3.Fundraising
In addition to recruiting and developing partnerships this role involves planning and organising fund-raising events with partners: either firms or local hubs that need support to design and organise fundraising events. Also to submit grant applications to smaller grant giving trusts to fund the central rewards – particularly the food hub and social events.
In particular you will have the following responsibilities.
Promoting and publicising TimeBuilders to key potential partners, communicating the story and impact of TimeBuilders to create long term support.
Developing good relationships with key managers at partner organisations so that an awareness and support of TimeBuilders runs through the organisation.
Meeting targets for spending opportunities and donations from corporate partners.
Setting up systems for rewards being donated on a regular basis. Producing reports and feedback to partners to help them understand the impact of their donations.
Working with local TimeBuilder groups to run fundraising events for their own spending opportunities.
Developing home grown spending opportunities including high quality social events that people want to come to.
Drafting applications to smaller grant giving trusts to provide a fund.
Organising coach trips, activity days at Edale and so on in conjunction with the rest of the team.
Skills and attributes required
Excellent at developing and maintaining relationships characterised by professionalism and passion for the purpose and impact of TimeBuilders.
Comfortable with developing new relationships through prospecting, networking and “cold calling”.
Comfortable with developing ideas under your own initiative.
Able to produce fluent and inspiring communications, both verbal and written.
Able to design good promotional literature.
Able to work with people across a range of backgrounds equally effective with grass roots community members and senior managers in both private and public sector organisations.
Hours: 37.5 hours/week
Starting salary: £18,000
To apply please send your CV and a letter (not more than 2 pages) outlining your suitability for the post to Graham Duncan: graham.duncan@stmarys-church.co.uk.
Closing date: Friday 25th March 2016