Funding and Grants Manager

Location: Hybrid - remote and office based- you will be required to attend your nearest Generation hub office in London/Leeds/ Manchester/Birmingham/Scotland 1-4 times a month (based on proximity to the offices)

Salary: London – £39-42k (inclusive of London-weighting), Elsewhere - £34-£37k

Contract: Full Time (40 hours a week) or part time considered. Flexible working hours available.

Deadline for applications: 30th Sept at midday

Interviews: From week commencing 7th Oct

ABOUT GENERATION

Generation is a charity with the vision of a meaningful career for every person. Our aim is to support people facing significant and multiple barriers to employment into life-changing careers they otherwise could not access.

We achieve this with a unique methodology of profession-specific skills bootcamp training, focussed on in-demand careers (specifically in the tech, healthcare and green sectors), with extensive, ongoing pastoral support and matchmaking to employer partners. 

Generation launched globally in 2015, and has grown quickly to become the world’s largest demand-led employment initiative. We have placed >100,000  people into roles, working with over 4,000 employer partners to date across 16 countries and 26 professions.

Since launching in the UK in 2019 have now trained more than 3000 people. Our work focuses on supporting those from diverse groups facing barriers to desirable employment. For these learners, we have achieved an industry leading c. 70% job placement rate with learners now placed at >800 employers.

We have secured transformative corporate funding from Microsoft, the JP Morgan Charitable Foundation, the Macquarie Group Foundation, Barclays, Blackrock, and many more. We are also the leading charity delivering under contracts from the Department for Education’s Skills Bootcamp strand. This has driven our scale to new programmes, regions and beneficiary groups.

By joining Generation UK&I, you will become part of an organisation committed to social impact and determined to play its part in changing the system in this context. The work is fast-paced, exciting, and innovative. 

Find out more at https://uk.generation.org/ 

You can also learn more about our culture, directly from our incredible people - What is it like to work at Generation?

Generation acknowledges the duty of care to safeguard, protect, and promote the welfare of staff and learners and is committed to ensuring safeguarding practice reflects statutory responsibilities, and government guidance and complies with best practice.

All our staff in the UK are required to undergo a DBS check.

ABOUT THE ROLE

As Funding and Grants Manager you’ll secure, manage and develop relationships with our funders and partners.  Your remit will include every aspect of the grant, funding and partnership lifecycle from developing new opportunities to reporting on live delivery and evaluating completed work.

Working within a passionate and effective  team, you’ll manage a portfolio of our funders, with a focus on corporates,  ensuring key milestones and requirements are captured for each funder, reporting is timely and accurate, and our processes and systems are compliant. 

You’ll play a key role in securing new partnerships and grants with a focus on private sector bids (corporate CSR, trusts and foundations) and with contributions to public sector bids (Department for Education, Combined Authorities). 

You’ll manage the department’s events programme of 3-5 events per year, working closely with corporate partners to deliver highly successful events to engage current and potential funders deeply with our work. 

You’ll work closely with our Head of Grant Management and Funding, as part of the Growth, Data and Operations team. This is an exciting team focusing on innovation and growth, including fundraising, new programmes, new partnerships, data processes and research. 

The role has the following key responsibilities:

Manage and develop our existing grants and funding partnerships (50%)

• Play point on relationships with a portfolio of c.10 funders, with a primary focus on corporate partners 
• Develop strong relationships through excellent comms in meetings and in reports/emails 
• Translate contracts/grants to operational plans and creating team guidance 
• Deliver delight/engagement initiatives to maximise chance of funding renewal (e.g. support staff volunteering, comms opportunities)
• Actively seek to grow and maximise relationships with funders, including scoping and writing of renewal opportunities

Identify and manage a pipeline of new opportunities and develop proposals to secure funding with a focus on corporate, trusts and foundations (30%)

• Research and network to identify new funding and partnership opportunities for Generation
• Create and manage a pipeline of opportunities with the potential to drive growth to hit our targets
• Submit expressions of interests, secure introductions or reach out cold to begin building relationships
• Meet funders and partners to understand their needs and desires from funding
• Write proposals end-to-end drawing on expertise and support from colleagues where you need it
• Present proposals to funders 

Deliver high quality stakeholder engagement events (15%)

• Take a strategic lead for the department on events, with the purpose of (1) engaging current partners more deeply with our work (2) engaging potential/new partners with an aim to convert them to funders (3) raising the profile of Generation’s work to support our positioning as a sector leader
• Manage  all aspects of event management for 3-5 events per year, including coordinating invites, sourcing speakers, venue logistics and on-the-day management (1x large event >100 attendees annually, plus further smaller events with 30-50 attendees)

Contribute to the wider success and growth of Generation in the UK & globally (5%)

• Work closely with Generation UK and global colleagues, including the global partnerships team which does this work across Generation countries, to support global grants and share information/learnings 
• Get close to our impact and work as a charity, devoting time to delivering mock interviews for learners on cohorts, and helping out with interviewing prospective applicants 
• Contribute to a culture of ideas generation, feedback and learnings on a 1-1, team and organisational level

Key KPI’s for the role (year 1) - 

1. Submit bids >£1m, with a target to secure >£0.5mil 
2. Manage 7-10 grants from our corporate portfolio, submitting 100% of reports on time 
3. Deliver >3 events, with >150 attendees in total 

Requirements

Here are the core attributes we think you’ll need in the role:

• You’re a highly organised and self motivated professional, able to manage multiple projects independently and ruthlessly prioritise, whilst always staying focussed on your overarching goals.
• You’re a strong writer, you have an engaging, concise and compelling writing style for proposals and reports
• You’re detail-oriented, willing and able to dot the i’s and cross the t’s in a report or submission
• You’re comfortable with numbers analysing data to identify key trends, managing targets and creating budgets 
• You’re a people person, excelling at quickly building new, lasting relationships with partners
• You’re an effective communicator, able to talk to a range of people and comfortable with delivering difficult or complex messages to partners in writing or discussion
• You’re passionate about the cause, with a demonstrated interest and motivation to support those from a disadvantaged background and see the importance of what we are trying to achieve in the long term

PERSON SPECIFICATION

To succeed, we think you’ll need experience of…

• Writing grant applications/proposals and securing 5 and 6 figure grants/contracts
• Organizing events for 50–100 people 
• Managing multiple and complex partnerships with corporates and/or trusts and foundation (ideally for contracts worth >£100K)
• Identifying new funding and partnership opportunities though research and networking

A FAIR CHANCE

Every role at Generation is open to applications from all sections of society. We believe in the potential of everyone; regardless of race, religion or belief, ethnic origin, different physical ability, family structure, socio-economics, age, nationality or citizenship, marital, domestic or civil partnership status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or any other aspect that makes you, well, you.

We believe that the more diverse we are the better we become. More than just encouraging your application, we're committed to conscious inclusion that (we hope) cultivates an ethos of belonging, connection and shared purpose. We go further together. It’s this philosophy that drives us towards our mission. We open our doors to those who share this mindset.

We are particularly interested in hearing from candidates from marginalised groups. We will assess applications on a rolling basis and close this posting as soon as we have found the right candidate. We look forward to hearing from you.

Benefits

At Generation, we're changing the lives of many individuals, and that in itself gets us out of bed! Here are a few other benefits you'll experience working with the UK team:

• Purpose and social impact in the heart of your work
• Opportunity to make your mark - you'll have a lot of autonomy to bring the Generation blueprint to life in a way that makes sense for your area of work
• Opportunity to get involved with a range of activities and varied projects - we're a small team, so there are lots of opportunities to get involved in projects across the whole organisation
• We offer flexible and remote working to accommodate everyone's preferred working pattern/preferences and unique needs
• Working from home set up offer of support of £300 to help you make your working-from-home setup comfortable and efficient
• Professional Development is a priority for Generation and employees and you can access to up to £1,000 towards your learning & development per year. This support is accompanied by up to 5 days of training days/ study leave per year to enable your development activities.