Job Description
Paid Role: Prison Gifting Scheme Coordinator
Three days per week during term time (30 weeks per year)
£35k pro rata: 18 month fixed term contract
About Us
The Children’s Book Project is a registered charity that directly tackles inequalities in well-being, self esteem and educational outcomes amongst children by gifting beautiful, contemporary books to young people with very few books of their own. We will gift 350k pre-loved, carefully curated books to children across the UK this year including via schools, foodbanks and women’s groups and we work hard to ensure the relevance and appeal of every book gifted. We have an incredible team of talented and multi-skilled volunteers who work with passion to put books into the hands of children who might not otherwise have access to book ownership.
Our model
We began in London in 2011, grew slowly and now have an efficient delivery model that gifts over 240k books across the
Capital each year. Well established donation points plus a calendar of book drives conducted by community groups and schools provide a steady supply of books. Our beneficiary settings include schools, community groups and prisons, all with an above average level of deprivation.
Our national model has historically invited donors to identify a registered school via our map and to drop books themselves.
From Autumn 2022 we plan to augment our offer in three targeted cities with a series of school book drives and coordinated delivery of up to 110k books into local schools.
Our work in London is labour-intensive but ensures a steady supply of contemporary new and pre-loved books, their relevance to every recipient audience and the quality of the resources we give to schools to put on a gifting event.
The Prison Gifting Programme
One fast-developing strand of our work is a carefully implemented gifting programme delivered via seven
UK prisons . The ‘Family Gifting Programme’ uniquely gives prisoners multiple opportunities to choose and gift free as-new books to their children, to engage in discussions with their children and our volunteers about these books and to share books together. Gifting is done via a variety of avenues including during Visitor Sessions, via the prison library and via a series of Pop Up Bookshop events that we run in person. All gifting places emphasis on the parent choosing books with, or on behalf of, their child. Over time our locally-based volunteers will increasingly support these book conversations at hands-on book gifting events and help to support the decision making of prisoners that may not feel confident about their children’s interests.
Core aim of this role
This role will support consistent and effective delivery of this programme across seven prisons. They will connect with the Family Liaison staff member at each prison and ensure that there are sufficient books, volunteers and additional resources for regular book gifting events to take place. They will recruit and manage local teams of Children’s Book Project volunteers whose brief will be to deliver in-person Pop Up Bookshop events on a termly basis and will also support each prison’s Family Liaison team to plan and deliver additional gifting events (e.g. at Christmas).
The Family Gifting Programme aims to support family cohesion, provide multiple platforms for conversation between prisoners and their families and to address some of the many emotional challenges faced by affected children. It also seeks to build prisoners’ self esteem as parents and their own literacy skills, both known to influence reoffending rates. The programme’s ambition is that any child with a parent in a participating prison will receive up to ten as new books per year. A core element of this role will be to measure and evaluate its multiple perceived impacts and in time to finesse our delivery model to ensure maximum benefits for key audiences.
The opportunity
With many well-established processes and relationships in place, we can be more strategic about all aspects of our prison-based activity:
(1) planning gifting events in conjunction with each family liaison officer, (2) recruiting and educating local volunteer teams to enhance our presence and prisoners' experiences (3) ensuring effective evaluation of all activity . Greater operational resource will ensure that we can take advantage of existing momentum and build on current relationships to support improved delivery, growth and requests for funding.
Prisons currently supported: HMP Ashfield, HMP Doncaster, HMP
Dovegate, HMP Lowdham Grange, HMP Styal, HMP Thameside and HMP Wayland.
What does the role involve?
You will be taking overall responsibility for the prison programme but will be strongly supported by our core delivery team that is responsible for planning and delivering all book gifting activity:
● Over time to create a model for “what good looks like” for prison book-gifting that is open to continuous improvement and sharing of best practice between prisons
● To create, develop and maintain qualitative reporting on key metrics and impacts
● To build a relationship with the contacts at each of our partner prisons to understand the potential book gifting opportunities at their site and to help them to develop a
gifting plan accordingly
● To ensure that each prison site stays ‘on plan’ in terms of its anticipated delivery of book gifting events. To work with each site in the event that adjustments are required
● To plan and request from the Children’s Book Project central team all resource requirements for each site including books and additional creative resources
● To support and manage the local volunteer team at each site to ensure they have the resource and know-how to deliver a termly Pop-Up Bookshop event
● To fully ambassador the values and ethos of The Children’s Book Project
Who are we looking for?
Firstly, that our aims and ethos really resonate with you. To be successful in the role, you will:
● This role will suit someone with previous project management experience, happy to liaise with multiple stakeholders (our staff contacts and volunteers across each of the seven prisons) and capable of retaining oversight of the differing programmes at each site
● You will be comfortable ensuring that planned activity is on track to meet our gifting targets / working with each prison to adjust as required
● You will be highly organised and proactive but also comfortable with the sometimes unpredictable nature of prison settings, which may necessitate last minute changes to planned activities
● Be comfortable juggling multiple projects with differing schedules across multiple prisons
● Have excellent communication skills and enjoy building a team of volunteers empowered to run meaningful prison events
● Be target oriented, able to forecast required volunteer resource and other resources as required
● Be a builder, with entrepreneurial spirit, capable of adapting, prioritising and problem-solving
● Have solid people management skills; able to support, respect, value & motivate those around you
● You will be professional, gracious, inclusive, collaborative and collegiate - continuously creating positive experiences and connections
● You will be adept at gathering and reporting qualitative and meaningful data that evidences impact and clear outputs
● You do not need formal qualifications. Effective organisational and communication skills, plus experience of liaison with multiple contacts to achieve a goal are the key requirements for this role
Anticipated commitment
This role can be undertaken remotely at home or can be office based at our premises in W10 where there are usually other volunteers on site at least three days per week. We anticipate that this role will require a commitment of two days per week during term-time including regular visits to prison sites (up to seven visits termly). These hours can be spread across the week if required. * Please note that prison visiting times are pre-determined by each site so flexibility for early starts will be required.
To find out more or to apply
We would love to hear from you and tell you more. Please send a CV or summary of any relevant experience to arrange a phone call at your convenience.
Job Types: Part-time, Fixed term contract
Contract length: 18 months
Part-time hours: 24 per week
Salary: £30,000.00-£35,000.00 per year
Benefits:
Schedule:
- Flexitime
- Monday to Friday
Experience:
- Project management: 3 years (required)
Licence/Certification:
- Driving Licence (required)
Willingness to travel:
Work Location: Remote
Application deadline: 10/02/2023
Reference ID: Prison's Gifting Coordinator
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