Head of Communities and Participation

Head of Communities & Participation
Contract type: Permanent 
Full time: 34.5 hours, we are open to a conversation about how you work these hours
Location: Hybrid between home and our London Office, Shipley Office or Glasgow office
Salary Range: £74,000 - £82,000

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

If you’re passionate about equity, community empowerment, and transforming cancer care, this is your opportunity to lead change at scale.

We’re looking for a dynamic, experienced and inspiring leader to join us as Head of Communities & Participation to drive our organisational ambition to centre participation of people living with cancer in our work.

This is a high-profile, strategic leadership position where you’ll shape and deliver Macmillan’s vision for participation and community engagement across the four nations. This role is about driving game changing impact for people living with cancer, especially those who receive the worst experiences. You’ll be relentless in ensuring communities and people living with cancer are at the heart of our decision-making and service design within Macmillan and drive improvements in how cancer care is experienced across the UK.

You’ll lead the development of inclusive participation routes, prioritising marginalised communities, and drive bold initiatives to truly enable and empower communities. Working across internal teams and external partners, you’ll strengthen and build strategic relationships and leave a legacy of empowered communities that drive change for people living with cancer. 

Key responsibilities:

Strategic leadership and team development

• Develop and lead a high performing communities and participation team.
• Act as a senior spokesperson and thought leader, influencing policy and practice across sectors. 

Embedding participation across Macmillan

• Play an organisational leadership role ensuring communities and participation is central to Macmillan’s culture and ways of working.
• Develop and embed participation frameworks, policies, and processes across Macmillan. 

Community mobilisation and partnership building

• Build and implement community mobilisation strategies that drive local and national change. 
• Collaborate with system partners to test and scale anchor organisation models of support. 

Developing insight-driven interventions

• Use insight and intelligence to drive targeted, outcome-led interventions. 

Lead high quality impactful engagement with people with lived experience

• Lead strategic engagement mechanisms for people with lived experience to shape services and interventions. 

About you

The successful candidate will demonstrate the following skills and experience:

• Significant senior leadership and line management experience.
• A strong track record of implementing strategy, leading through change, and delivering clear outcomes.
• Proven experience embedding equity, participation and user-led design approaches. 
• Expertise in building strategic partnerships with community organisations based on trust, transparency and share objectives.
• Excellent communication, influencing, and stakeholder engagement skills, with a collaborative and proactive style.

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: Thursday 28th August
Interview date: Thursday 18th September

Please note: Interviews will be held in person at our London office. This will involve two parts: a panel interview, and a facilitated session with people living with cancer and community organisation representatives. More details will be shared with shortlisted candidates. 

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.