We're hiring!

Role:

• Admin / Operations Lead

Salary:

• £28,000 pro rata (£28k a year would be for 5 days a week)
  
• All Navigate employees and co-directors receive the same salary
• We expect this role to take a maximum of 2 x 7.5 hour days per week

Location:

• Strong preference for UK based
  
• Mostly remote work
  
• Face to face meetings in the South West (often Stroud) as needed, no more than monthly except in exceptional circumstance

Contract:

• Maximum 2 day week (flexible about which days) - see more detail below
• We are hoping to find someone who would join the organisation longer term, but we are also open to finding someone who would work freelance to fulfil some parts of this role.

Read more below or download the job ad and full role description.

Overview
 
About Navigate
We want Life on Earth to thrive, in a World that works for all. In the devastating social, climate and ecological context we’re in, Navigate exists to do what it can to help turn things around. We want the work we do - facilitation & training, for transformative & collaborative processes & systems -  to support change at the systemic root causes of the crises we face. We want to be as strategically effective as we can. We have worked for years supporting groups working for social and environmental justice with mediation, facilitation & training. We are now also exploring ways to bring together and sustain much bigger, deeper and more powerful social movements, and to support radical democracy in communities.
 
We try to create an environment of care and support within Navigate, where we get to connect with each other in a Human way - this is really important to us - whilst keeping our purpose at the centre of what we do. We are trying to find ways of doing things that keep a feeling of lightness and meaning in our work, and support everyone to do the things they have abilities, energy and passion for.  It’s important to us to find flow as a team, and to have the feeling of working together effectively, in harmony. We really value having clear, strong, living systems and ways of working - ways of handling conflict, making decisions and getting the support we need, for example. We also understand these as evolving and improving ongoingly, and that we’re not and never will be perfect.
 
Another thing that feels important to us is together finding ways to work with the cycles of our bodies (including menstrual cycles), to undo what we understand as a patriarchal pattern that requires everyone to work in the same way without sensitivity to our different physical, emotional, mental realities.
 
You can see more about the current team HERE.
 
You would be working with Roz and Paul, who are both co-directors and facilitators with Navigate. Paul has been working as a mediator, facilitator and trainer for about 12 years and has been at Navigate for about 7 years. Roz has been working as a facilitator in settings somewhat different to Navigate for the last 15 years and began learning conflict mediation when she joined Navigate 4 years ago. Because Paul has significantly more experience and training in the approaches we work with (e.g. Mediation, Convergent Facilitation, etc.) and with social movement strategy and theory of change, Paul will mostly likely be leading on many decisions, especially in terms of the coops strategy and theory of change. Facilitators will most likely look more to Paul for advice and support with facilitation and mediation. 
 
Navigate is a cooperative, but is not a structure where everyone decides everything with the same level of authority. We will provide more in depth information on our organisational structure for those that we’re inviting to interview.
 
Kathryn and Jana are both in the process of leaving Navigate and would both be involved in the induction process / hand over for the person in this role, before they say final goodbyes. Kathryn is one of the founding members of Navigate and has been deeply and profoundly involved in environmental and social justice movements in the UK for over 35 years. She’s moving on from Navigate to develop new projects around sustaining ourselves as we confront the many crises we face and to create more space for caring responsibilities. Jana joined Navigate around 4 years ago and since then they’ve created new courses, mediated conflicts, guided internal processes, facilitated us and others and saved us when technology fails. They’ve now moved to The Netherlands where they’ll be continuing to mediate, facilitate and train, as well as focusing on integrating somatic approaches into these fields.
 
The Application Process
We’re aiming to make this application process as inclusive, accessible and transparent as we can, so people with different backgrounds and identities can explore and demonstrate their compatibility with the Navigate team and this role.
 
We’re taking a CV-less approach. The 4 questions below focus on some critical things for the role and by answering them you can feel confident you’ve highlighted the most relevant experience, skills and ways of being you have for this role.  If you feel you’d like to send us your CV as well, you can. We’re not expecting you to and it won’t disadvantage your application if you do, or if you don’t.
 
If you’d like to know more about this approach to hiring, or give us feedback, do get in touch, or checkout Collaborative Futures whose approach we’ve drawn on.
 
Dates

1. The closing date for applications is 5pm, Friday 10th Nov 2023
2. We’ll let you know if we’d like to invite you to a 1st interview by 5pm, Thurs 16th Nov 2023
3. The 1st round of interviews will be online on 28th-30th Nov
4. We’ll then let you know if we’d like to invite you to a 2nd interview (which will include asking you to complete a task before the interview) by 5pm Mon 4th Dec
5. The 2nd round of interviews will be on 12th-14th Dec
6. We’ll let you know if we’d like to offer you work with Navigate by 5pm, 20th Dec
7. From there, there are several possibilities, which we talk about below

 
A few more things about the process...

• We want to find someone for whom this role really fits (someone who feels confident they’ll enjoy the role, be able to bring their skills to it)
• We also want to find someone who really fits for Navigate (e.g. someone who shares the coops values and who enjoys our ways of working)
• We don’t think either you or we can really know that just from a normal hiring process
• So there are a few different things we might request at the end of the process above…
  • Your paid involvement in a distinct project for a specific length of time
  • A full trial period for 6 months
    • If we ask you to be with us for a trial period, at that point we’ll share our suggested ‘induction, support and trial period’ process with you and check whether it works for you, as well as us
  • After the trial period, we might invite you to join Navigate as a member of staff OR  to work with Navigate as a freelancer
• We’ll ask you if there’s anything you would need in order to be involved in any of those things e.g. you need a particular pattern of working, or to leave your existing job at a certain time, or you know that you would want to be an employee, or know you’d want to be a freelancer.  We really want you to apply if you think Navigate and this role might be a fit for you, so please do let us know what you would need, so we can do our best to come to something that works for us both. 

About the Role
 
The Main Objectives of the Role
We know how crucial the work of this role is and would love to find a team member who brings their creativity and passion to it.  The main objective of this role is to hold the logistics, practicalities and administration of making Navigate powerfully effective (so that the facilitators can facilitate as much as possible).  In an ideal world we’d love to work with someone who’s passionate about and engaged by all of the below, and we know that might not be possible and want to talk to you about which bits really suit you and which bits don’t, so we can see if there is a set up that works for everyone

• Finding funding - for the coop in general and for specific projects: including identifying relevant funding opportunities, building and maintaining relationships with funders, writing and submitting applications, tracking work done on funding obligations, coordinating reporting to funders and liaising with partner organisations.
• Holding an overview of Navigate’s financial situation: analysing cash flow and end of year accounts (we have an accountant to draw up the end of year accounts), reporting to the team on financial situation, developing organisational and project budgets
• Bookkeeping and sorting the payroll
• Keeping us legal: complying with Companies House legal requirements, drafting and updating contracts, sorting NEST pension schemes, making sure we comply with privacy legislation, sorting insurance
• Coordinating external communications: writing, designing and sending out our newsletter, creating graphics, maintaining and creatively improving the website, sometimes posting to Facebook
• Providing tech support
• Coordinating events: creating budgets and tracking expenditure and income, planning practicalities, advertising, setting up ticketing, finding venues etc
  
• Coordinating projects: planning what needs to be done by whom and when, making sure it’s all running on time and to budget
  

 
Read the full role description here.
 
NB: Please do note that this role is not a route in to facilitating with Navigate. It’s a separate role. We’re hoping to start a separate process of working with facilitators new to Navigate in the middle of 2024

About You
 
You’ll Thrive in this Role if You…

• Feel care for and believe in Navigate’s purpose and values
  
• Enjoy practising listening with the intention to really understand others
• Get a sense of satisfaction and energy from beautiful, effective administration / organisation
• Feel confident with numbers, enjoy research / fundraising and take pleasure from writing clear, honest, inviting content
• Hold an awareness of and desire to learn more about different types of power and explore these with care and in a practical way
• Can navigate relevant technical tools and support colleagues with them with ease
• Enjoy desk work

To Apply!
We’re aiming to make this application process as inclusive, accessible and transparent as possible, so people with different backgrounds and identities can explore and demonstrate their compatibility with the Navigate team and this role.
 
We’re taking a CV-less approach.  We’ll ask you for some basic information about yourself and then ask you 4 questions (below), which focus on some critical things for the role.  We want to give you space to speak about the aspects of your experience that feel most important to you in relation to this job. Feel free to draw from personal, voluntary or professional experiences.  Answering the questions below fully really is enough!  And if you feel you’d like to send us your CV as well, you can.  We’re not expecting you to and it won’t disadvantage your application if you do, or if you don’t.

1. Your experience:  Please tell us something about your life and work experiences that you feel could make you a good fit for this role
2. Why this role?  What is it about the specifics of this role that make you really want to do it?
3. Work teams and environments:  Please tell us something about what’s important to you in a work environment like Navigate and what qualities you look for in a team (please bear in mind what we’ve said about Navigate’s organisational structure above)
4. Personal strengths:  Please tell us something about what you’re proud of, what you feel competent in, and where your strengths lie, in relation to this role.

 
To apply for this role you can do any of the following (pick the one that suits you best), by 5pm, Friday 10th Nov 2023

• Complete this form
• Email us your responses to all the questions in the form, to hello[@]navigate.org.uk
• Email us a video/s of your responses to all the questions in the form, to hello[@]navigate.org.uk
• Leave us a voice note/s (Whatsapp please) with your response to the questions in the form, to 07944705289
• Or some combination of the above, if you like

 
The aim of this approach is to make the opportunity as accessible as possible and ensure a diverse range of people are able to demonstrate their potential.
 
If you have any questions about the role or the process, if anything isn’t clear please, please do contact us at hello[@]navigate.org.uk