Community Grants Strategic Lead

Community Grants Strategic Lead
Contract type: 18-month fixed term contract
Full time: 34.5 hours, we are open to a conversation about how you work these hours
Location: Hybrid between home and our London, Glasgow or Shipley offices. The requirement to come into the office is once a month, but you are also able to attend more frequently should you wish to as there is always a space here for you to work. There will also be occasional travel for meetings and events.
Salary range: £59,500 - £65,500

Are you passionate about community‑led change and equitable grant making? Do you have experience leading on the design and development of impactful and inclusive community grant programmes?

If you’re excited by shaping a community grants portfolio that puts lived experience, learning and impact at its heart, this could be the role for you.

About us

At Macmillan you'll find talented people working together to do whatever it takes to support people living with cancer. We're going all out to find even better ways to help even more people who need our support. Our values are at the heart of who we are and everything we do, inspiring our thinking and guiding our actions.

Our new organisational strategy sets out how we’ll fight even harder to make every pound raised count for even more. With your help, we’ll transform cancer care for good.

About the role

You will provide strategic leadership for Macmillan’s Community Grants portfolio, ensuring the organisation has a coherent, aligned and future‑focused approach to community grant making.

Community Grants are a key mechanism through which Macmillan supports community organisations, people with lived experience and local systems to respond to cancer‑related needs. In this role, you will shape, design and oversee a diverse portfolio of community grant programmes, expected to include a minimum of three grant types, such as:

• At least one round of CARE Grants
• The review and relaunch of the Small (Support) Grants programme
• The design and launch of a new Large Core Funding programme

You will ensure these programmes align with Macmillan’s national strategy and organisational objectives, complement wider grant and community initiatives, and deliver clear purpose and impact. Central to the role is embedding equitable grant‑making principles, strengthening lived‑experience‑led design, and building organisational capability in inclusive, transparent and effective funding practice.

You will also play a leading role in shaping the future structure and resourcing of community grant making at Macmillan, using insight, learning and best practice to ensure the model remains agile, collaborative and learning‑led.

Key responsibilities:

• Lead the end-to-end design and strategic oversight of the Community Grants Model, ensuring high-quality scoping, award, delivery, learning and exit phases.
• Shape and oversee a coherent, future‑focused portfolio of community grant programmes, informed by insight, landscape scanning and community need.
• Ensure people with lived experience and community organisations are central to decision making, programme design and delivery.
• Embed open, transparent and equitable grant‑making practices by influencing internal policy, decision making and ways of working.
• Provide strategic leadership to teams delivering community grants, ensuring clear tools, processes, guidance and consistent quality.
• Oversee portfolio budgets, performance, quality assurance, risk management and compliance arrangements.
• Co‑lead the Community Grants Delivery Group, enabling strong cross‑organisational collaboration and engagement.
• Lead organisational learning from the grants portfolio, working with insight, performance and evaluation colleagues to inform strategy and programme development.
• Champion best practice in community grant making, including test‑and‑learn and innovative approaches.
• Collaborate across teams to embed a joined‑up approach to community and wider grant making, including integrating capacity‑strengthening offers.
• Represent Macmillan externally in funder networks, partnerships and learning forums.
• Line manage the Community Grants Manager, providing direction, support and performance management.

About you

You will bring a strong mix of strategic leadership, collaborative working and a deep commitment to equitable, community‑led change. Key requirements include:

• Experience of grant programme design, management and strategic oversight
• Strong understanding of community development, funding environments and/or social justice movements
• Experience of co‑design or participatory methods, including working with people with lived experience
• Ability to lead and manage complex portfolios in agile, evolving environments
• Strong relationship‑building skills across internal teams and external partners
• Excellent communication, analytical and programme management skills
• A clear commitment to equity, lived experience led approaches and social justice.

In return, we offer a range of benefits including:

• 25 days holiday plus flexible bank holiday options, increasing by 1 day every year of service up to 30 days
• Pension matched up to 7.5%
• 120+ learning and development offers, with access to external professional qualifications
• Flexible working patterns, such as compressed hours, flexibility to work earlier or later around our core working hours of 10am-4pm
• Holiday buying and selling scheme, life insurance, free wills, retail discounts and much more

Recruitment process

Application deadline: 23:59 on Monday 25th May
1st stage interview date: Friday 5th June
2nd stage interview date: Wednesday 10th June

To ensure fairness and consistency to select the best candidate for this role, all our applications are anonymised up until an interview has been confirmed.

So we can support you to be at your best during the application or interview process, please contact Macmillan TA Team TATeam@macmillan.org.uk for advice and reasonable adjustments. 

We welcome applications from everyone who meet the criteria and strongly encourage individuals to apply who have a disability, impairment or health condition or individuals who identify as Black, Asian or from another minority ethnic background, as these groups are currently under-represented at Macmillan. Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategy here along with our internal employee representation body, ‘Our Voice’ and 8 Employee Network groups help us promote fairness and belonging, becoming an engaged and inclusive organisation for all our people.