Salary: £35,000 pro rata, 0.6FTE (3 days per week); salary subject to review in 2024
Application deadline: 5pm on Friday 29 March
You can listen to this information as an audio file here and download it as a pdf here
Overview
The Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance (CHWA) is seeking a Regional Lead for the Midlands.
CHWA is the national membership organisation for creative health. We use the term “creative health” to mean any arts or cultural activity that supports health or wellbeing. Our main roles as an organisation are: advocating for creative health, supporting networks for creative and cultural workers and partners in health and social care, and building resources to help make this work more possible. We don't provide creative activities that support health and wellbeing ourselves - instead we support other people who do.
This new regional post is a key part of our work as an Investment Principles Support Organisation (IPSO) funded by Arts Council England from 2023-6. This is the second of three new regional roles for CHWA, designed to catalyse and support work in the North, Midlands and East of the country. This role will focus primarily on creative health across Derbyshire, including ACE’s Priority Places and Levelling Up for Culture Places: North East Derbyshire, Chesterfield, Bolsover and Amber Valley. The postholder will also have a light-touch remit for advocacy and networking across the broader Midlands.
The post is about developing strategic and infrastructural support for creative health, rather than delivering projects. We want the postholder to bring together partners across Derbyshire to help us understand what the enablers and barriers to regional and local development are, and to develop and test systems that will make a positive difference across Derbyshire. With committed support in place from local and national partners, this is an exciting opportunity to build on this momentum and create long-lasting change.
Key national partners for this work include the National Centre for Creative Health, the LENs (lived experience network), and our funders Arts Council England. Our regional partners are Arts Derbyshire and the Public Health team in Derbyshire County Council. They will each support you to work with existing local networks and champions for this work in the health, social care and cultural sectors.
Arts Derbyshire is the strategic arts charity for Derbyshire and sits at the heart of Derbyshire’s creative sector. Creative Health is a central thread to its work. It is currently working to embed creative health in the social prescribing offer in the county, and we would envisage that this role would work alongside Arts Derbyshire’s Social Prescribing Development Manager (Culture). You can read more here: www.artsderbyshire.org.uk/artsandhealth
This role is funded until end March 2026.
Key duties
We anticipate the role being largely focused on Derbyshire with a smaller amount of time (around a day per month) devoted to broader regional work across the Midlands. There is huge demand for infrastructure support and we don’t expect to comprehensively meet this need with this role. Instead we want to prioritise in-depth learning about local and regional structures and strategy.
This is an exploratory and developing role and we expect it to evolve across the two years. Some core aspects are outlined below, however.
In Derbyshire...
We’d like the postholder to
- Seek to understand and map existing work, partnerships, commissioning processes and networks for creative health across Derbyshire, in collaboration with the Arts Derbyshire Creative Health team and the Public Health team in Derbyshire County Council (DCC)
- Assess the potential to work more effectively with county-wide systems, including Joined Up Care Derbyshire (the area’s Integrated Care System) and Derbyshire County Council.
- Help to develop regional arrangements that might support creative health, in consultation with partners. We might want to consider a strategic group for example, and/or a peer-to-peer practitioner group connecting with Arts Derbyshire’s existing network. Any groups should engage with lived experience from the start.
- Work with CHWA’s North Regional Lead to exchange ideas and processes for developing this kind of regional work.
- Convene occasional events and workshops around creative health.
The broader ‘Midlands’ role will focus primarily on advocacy and networking, working with colleagues across the region, including CHWA’s volunteer regional champions and partners at the National Centre for Creative Health.
Evaluation
We want to understand the impact of this kind of strategic role. The postholder will work with our partners in the region to assess progress. We’d also like the postholder to familiarise themselves with the Creative Health Quality Framework and use this as a tool to support the work more broadly, and to evaluate how it is progressing against the framework’s core principles.
Fundraising
- Funding is in place for this role until the end of March 2026[2]. CHWA will work with the postholder to investigate options to support the same role or equivalent support beyond this point.
- CHWA will also work with the postholder to increase provision for and around this existing role.
Person specification
We always aim to be collaborative; caring; inclusive; and committed to positive social change. These are our values as an organisation and it’s essential you feel comfortable with this, and that you feel you can work in this way.
We also consider the following to be essential for this role:
- Diplomacy and experience of working with people and groups with a variety of professional and lived experiences
- Experience of collaborative leadership and/or coproduction
- Attention to detail, persistence and patience
- Optimism and lateral thinking
- Good, proactive communication skills
- Flexibility and willingness to listen and learn
- Knowledge and/or experience of working with creative health[3]
- Experience of working at a strategic level in different kinds of organisations (e.g. organisations in different sectors, or of very different sizes)
- Experience managing budgets
If you have any of the following knowledge or experience we would like to hear about it:
- Work with local authorities and/or health or care institutions
- Work with large cultural institutions
- Work with small grassroots community organisations
- Work with people with lived experience of health issues
- Experience of fundraising
We are interested in hearing about transferable skills as well as direct experience of any of the above.
Access
This is a hybrid working role (see Place of Work, below). We are ready to adapt our working processes in discussion with applicants; please let us know about any access needs we can support.
Salary
£35,000 pro rata for 0.6FTE. We expect to undertake a review of this salary in 2024.
Contract
This is a fixed-term contract running until the end of March 2026. We are expecting the postholder to start around 3 June but we’re open to this being earlier or later based on your existing contracts.
The postholder will be paid monthly by BACS. CHWA will be responsible for paying Tax and National Insurance. The postholder will be eligible for the Nest pension scheme.
We’re interested in exploring options for infrastructural support beyond March 2026, but this will be subject to reviewing the nature of the support needed in the area, as well as fundraising.
Hours of work
This is a three-day per week role, or 22.5 hours per week. We’re happy to explore flexible working arrangements.
Place of work
CHWA doesn’t have an office so this role will be primarily remote, but we hope to be able to provide hot-desk space where it’s useful around the county via our partners. The role is also likely to require fairly frequent face-to-face work meetings with colleagues across Derbyshire. Derbyshire is a large and largely rural area with limited public transport options. The postholder will need to spend some time travelling around the county. Being able to drive and having access to a car might be helpful; but it’s not a requirement.
Expenses
CHWA will reimburse reasonable travel and subsistence expenses on the basis of agreement prior to travel. We will also reimburse any expenses incurred through the interview process. If you are freelance or unwaged and are selected for interview, we can offer a fee towards your time preparing for and attending interview.
How to apply
We would like to receive a CV and covering information explaining why you think you would be suitable for the role, referring to the Key Duties and Person Specification outlined above. Your covering information can be submitted as an email, an audio recording or a video recording as you prefer. We would prefer a written CV, but if this is not possible for any reason, please let us know and we can adapt accordingly.
Please tell us about any access needs we can meet to support your application process. We’d also appreciate it if you could click on this link and fill out this Equality, Diversity & Representation form when you apply. This form is anonymous and we won’t be able to connect it with your application, but it helps us assess whether we are reaching a wide pool of candidates. If the link doesn’t work for you let us know and we will find an alternative.
When you apply, please let us know whether you would be able to attend an interview on 24 or 25 April in Chesterfield. If you can’t make those dates and are shortlisted for the role, we will aim to find another mutually convenient time with you.
We are committed to ensuring our organisation is as diverse and representative as possible and are using the IncArts Unlock tool to support this recruitment process. We particularly want to encourage applications from people identifying with any of the protected characteristics as defined in the 2010 Equality Act, or who are from less affluent socioeconomic backgrounds.
Email: applications@culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk. If you want to contact us beforehand to arrange an information conversation, please email victoria@culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk
Timeline
Please send us your application by 5pm on Friday 29 March. We will let you know of our decision by Friday 12 April and we will aim to hold interviews on 24 or 25 April in person in Chesterfield.
Interviews will be in person for around an hour. We will send plans for the interview including any questions in advance, and let you know who will be on the interview panel before we meet you.
[1] See for example the recently published Creative Health Review (2023): https://ncch.org.uk/creative-health-review
[2] It should be noted that our funding agreement with Arts Council England (which includes this role) states that “Arts Council England can only guarantee future instalments of the grant as long as sufficient funds from the Government and/or the National Lottery are available to it. Therefore, it is possible that indicative amounts may be reduced.”
[3] We used “creative health” to mean any arts or cultural sector activity that supports health or wellbeing.