Overview

We’re Impact on Urban Health. We’re part of the UK’s largest place-based foundation, committed to achieving health equity by helping urban areas become healthier places for everyone to live. We seek to understand the deep causes of urban health issues and explore different ways of addressing them by combining the best sources of data, robust evidence, lived experience and practical interventions.

The south London boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark have been our home for over five centuries. It is here that we partner with organisations, groups and individuals – local, national and international – who are committed to achieving health equity in inner-city areas.

To drive better health in cities, we pay particular attention to the context in which people live and the wider determinants of their health, from finance and employment to social connections.

We have four programmes that each focus on one

of the following health issues:

• childhood obesity

• multiple long-term conditions

• the health effects of air pollution

• adolescent mental health

The Childhood Obesity programme is 4 years into its ten-year lifetime. Its focus is breaking the link between childhood obesity and living in a low income area. To do this, we focus on changing food environments in the places where families spend their time, so children from lower income families get equal access to healthy food . We work with partners across the public, private and charity sectors and have a multi-million pound portfolio of projects up and running trying to achieve this.

The programme is at a stage where it is starting to pinpoint which elements have the potential to grow, locally, in Southwark and Lambeth, and beyond and for creating wider impact beyond our boroughs. Our priorities this year include ensuring that we have processes in place to organise, demonstrate and effectively target the emerging insights from our work, to influence food systems in the UK and in other cities around the world.

Job description

At Impact on Urban Health we have a team of Programme Directors, each responsible for one of our programmes. The Programme Director (Childhood Obesity) oversees the overall strategy, portfolio of projects, spend, and impact of our work on childhood obesity. They report to the Executive Director of Programmes, manage a small team of Portfolio Managers, and collaborate with colleagues that support the programme’s communications and impact management activity. They also build relationships with external partners who can support and amplify the programme’s mission.

While making grants and investments is a big part of what we do, building partnerships is just as important. Our multidisciplinary team means we don’t expect applicants to be experienced in grant making to apply for this role. What we are looking for is a dynamic leader who can steer and support the work of a high-performing team.

Priorities for the role

• Oversee a portfolio of projects and tasks that maintains the programme’s strategic focus and relationships. Success will be the effective growth of successful projects

• Implement effective systems and processes with other Impact on Urban Health teams to make sure that impact management (evaluation, data and learning), communications and influencing activities connect and contribute to decision-making. Success would be a common understanding across teams on our childhood obesity hypotheses and goals, with work from across teams regularly feeding into childhood obesity related decision making

• Grow the external influence of the childhood obesity programme, including initiating activities with global partners

• Build greater focus in the team’s operations on the projects in the programme portfolio that are showing the greatest potential for wider impact scale (either through replication or through influencing wider industry and policy).

Responsibilities

Team leadership

• Hold and nurture leadership relationships with Programme Directors, Executive Director of Programmes, Executive Team and other teams’ directors. Manage a matrix working team, including 4 or 5 line reports

• Motivate, enable and offer pastoral guidance and support to individuals. This includes formal line management responsibilities such as performance tracking, annual reviews, personal development plans

• Lead or support occasional recruitment, where required.

Evaluation and learning

• Maintain and sharpen a culture of strategic reflection, learning, and evidence-based decisions across the portfolio

• Guide teams, partners and contractors in routinely and systematically distilling insights for programme operations and wider influencing

• Work with our Evidence and Impact Director to make sure that our programme evaluation tools and processes are fit for purpose

• Oversee execution of diverse and complex evaluation methods across the portfolio.

Portfolio Manager support

• Assure quality of project design, delivery and learning to meet standard of excellence

• Empower idea generation and ensure alignment with programme strategic direction

• Guide continual development of strand (sub programme) strategies

• Oversee investment process, including being accountable for childhood obesity proposals being submitted for internal investment approval.

Communications and indirect influencing

• Work with Communications team colleagues to design and implement a programme of communications that achieve childhood obesity insights sharing and influencing objectives.

• Represent the programme and the Foundation at external events, and enable the team to grow their profile in their distinct childhood obesity spheres of practice.

Corporate role and responsibility

• Manage the childhood obesity programme’s impact and spend performance

• Be a part of the Charity’s Foundation’s Executive Investment Committee – that makes spending decisions over 100k

• Satisfy governance and accountability requirements (Business Unit meetings, Business plan, Risk register, Reforecasts etc)

• Set annual programme goals for 2022 in next year’s business plan in conjunction with childhood obesity and wider leadership team.

Person specification

Guiding complex work

• Comfort with and confidence in independently navigating and embracing complexity

• Readiness to lead distinctly exploratory and nuanced work in a context of emergent evidence, uncertainty and change

• Apply programme logic and clear thinking to making confident choices

• Ability to convey and cut through complexity in a way that brings others along

• Demonstrated evaluative thinking and affinity to tracing impact in complexity, this includes fluency in systems change and exploratory evaluation, in addition to impact monitoring.

Shining through others

• Humble leadership style that nurtures a balanced and calm culture

• Experience in team and people management and empowering others to succeed

• Collaborative and inclusive leadership laterally, upwards and downwards

• Gravitas and credibility in external representation, where required.

Delivering at pace

• Strategic thinking and ability to cut through operational detail and see the bigger picture

• Can operate at pace and efficiency, with ability to prioritise and measure level of effort

• Readiness to spell out plans and deliver in a way that is self-led, dependable and diligent

• Demonstrated self-starter, who can hit the ground running in a new role

• Familiarity with the wider policy context in which the Childhood Obesity programme operates and communicates is a plus.

• Manage an external advisory committee, including the running of quarterly meetings.