Project Lead at Project Lead
Contract Type: Permanent
Role Type: Employment
Hours: Full time
Application deadline:
Based: Hybrid
Salary: £30,000 Per Annum
Salary Type: Fixed Salary
Location: Regionwide
Role description: Senior Project Support
Project Lead
Salary: £30,000 per annum (full time) Location: Northern England (home-based with Northern and national travel) Contract: Full time, permanent (subject to funding). Responsible to: Managing Director, People's Powerhouse CIC. Role made possible by funding from The National Lottery Community Fund.
About People's Powerhouse
People's Powerhouse is a Community Interest Company rooted in Northern England. It exists to put the voice of Northerners at the centre of the decisions that shape their lives, push more power and decision-making out of Westminster and into the North, and make sure the systems that shape people's lives actually work for them. Staff work on giving people a real say in decisions, running conversations and workshops with communities, community research, and cultural life.
It’s a small, committed team. We go where communities are, we listen properly, and we act on what we hear.
The Role
A hands-on role for a self-starter who believes real change starts with being heard. As well as supporting wider company activities, you’ll drive three core strands:
- Coast to Coast Listening Conversations: You’ll lead delivery of the Coast to Coast Listening project across Northern England, from the Cumbrian coast to the North Sea. These are skilled, honest conversations with communities whose voices are too often overlooked. Your focus is delivery and process: every conversation well-run, properly documented, and sticking closely enough to the agreed method that the Connection and Impact Manager can pull the findings together properly across the whole project.
- Communications and Content: You’ll produce the regular People’s Powerhouse bulletin and create social media content that builds visibility, tells stories from the findings, and gives the work and the organisation a distinctive voice online.
Across both strands, this role demands someone willing to be accountable, present and who sees things through. You’ll need to be tenacious and genuinely able to inspire others, whether a newly recruited community listener, a local partner, elected member or someone who has never been asked their opinion before. Just as important, you'll build relationships that last well beyond a single conversation, and you'll model creative ways of connecting with people who believe they have nothing to say that anyone wants to hear. Much of the value of this work lies in gently proving them wrong.
What You’ll Do
Coast to Coast Listening Conversations
- Get out and about, deep into communities and neighbourhoods and deliver the listening project across the Coast to Coast corridor of Northern England, working alongside the full range of communities you'll meet there
- Continually recruit, train and support a network of community listeners
- Keep the approach consistent wherever you're working, so what's agreed stays true to itself and the paperwork keeps pace
- Earn the trust of local communities, grassroots organisations, and local councils and public bodies, and hold on to it
- Work alongside the Connection and Impact Manager on evaluation and reporting
- Support the Managing Director through consistent work and dependability
Communications and Content
- Write the People’s Powerhouse bulletin so it's genuinely worth reading: informative, well-written, and keeping the network energised
- Create social media content people actually want to stop and read, celebrating achievements and opportunities and sharing listening stories
- Pitch in on wider communications for the organisation whenever it's needed
What We’re Looking For
Experience and Knowledge
- Real experience of getting stuck into your community, bringing people together, running a residents' group, campaigning, volunteering, or just being the person neighbours come to, something you believe in rather than a process you follow
- A habit of starting with what's already strong in a community, its people, skills and connections, rather than just its problems
- You care about the purpose behind this work, not just about running a programme
- You've recruited, trained, and supported people before, as listeners or changemakers, and know what that takes
- You can keep a process consistent and reliable while still flexing your approach to fit each context: rigour and creativity, both at once
- You can write well, whether that's bulletins, newsletters, or similar publications
- You're comfortable creating social media content with a purpose, the kind that builds a real audience
- An instinct for power, inequality, and what genuine participation actually asks of us
- Driving licence and access to a vehicle
Personal Qualities
- A genuine self-starter: you generate momentum, you don’t wait for it
- A completer-finisher: you follow things through and don’t leave loose ends
- Tenacious: you keep going when it is hard
- Able to inspire and motivate others across a wide range of contexts
- Skilled at listening: you hear what people mean, not just what they say
- A relationship-builder: you form connections that deepen over the medium term, not just for the length of a project
- Creative in how you connect: you find routes in for people who believe no one wants to hear what they have to say
- Comfortable working independently across a wide geography, and energised by the variety of cultures, communities and ways of life you'll encounter across the North
Desirable
- Connections across Northern England communities or civil society
- Experience working somewhere the delivery, research, and impact work are handled by different people
- An interest in giving people a real say in decisions that affect them, whether through public meetings, arts and creative projects, or community-led action
What We Offer
- £30,000 salary, full time
- Workplace pension
- Flexible working, shaped around the realities of being out with communities rather than behind a desk
- A role that’s part of something that matters
- A small team that trusts you to get on with the job
How to Apply
Send us a CV and a covering letter, no more than two sides of A4, to People@peoplespowerhouse.org.uk . We'd love to hear why this role, why now, and what you'd bring to each of the three strands of this work.
We particularly welcome applications from people with lived experience of the communities we work with. We don’t require formal qualifications; we require evidence that you can do the job.
Midnight on Sunday 16th August 2026 Interviews: Friday 28th August. (We reserve the right to close this recruitment early if we receive enough suitable applicants.)
People's Powerhouse CIC is committed to welcoming applications from people who are underrepresented in the charity and community sector.