Volunteer - Embedded Mentor

Two days pw until July 2025

Ref: VEM 241

Are you a proactive, compassionate and collaborative individual with a proven record of working positively with socially excluded children and young people and the ability to engage successfully despite 'challenging' behaviour?

If so, join St Giles as a Volunteer Embedded Mentor, where you will provide vital one-to-one mentoring and group work sessions for children and young people at risk of serious youth violence, gang activity and exploitation.

About St Giles Trust
An ambitious, well-established charity that helps people facing adversity to find jobs, homes and the right support they need. Central to our ethos is our belief that people with first-hand experience of successfully overcoming issues such as an offending background, homelessness, addictions and gang involvement, hold the key to positive change in others.

About this key role
St Giles' SOS+ Embedded Mentors work within the Youth Offending Service to support client's early intervention work in educational settings, through preventative sessions on violence, vulnerability and exploitation. Utilising a 'whole school' approach combining sessions to children, their parents and professions, you will support the Embedded Mentor in their role within each school, delivering sessions around gang involvement, violence and exploitation, encouraging the young people to develop a positive self-identity and healthy relationships.

We will also count on you to establish positive and professional relationships with the children, young people and professionals, building trust and creating a safe space for them in which to explore challenging and potentially traumatic issues and topics. Assisting with providing monitoring information and the evaluation of the project and developing and maintaining professional relationships with staff and safeguarding leads within each education setting, are also important elements of this role.

What we are looking for
• Personal experience of the criminal justice system, or lived experience of the issues facing this client group (i.e. involved in gangs or knife crime)
• Proven experience of working in a high intensity environment, being self-motivating, with an ability to effectively manage your own wellbeing
• Knowledge of the issues facing this client group, such as gangs, knife crime, social exclusion and isolation, child criminal exploitation, adverse childhood experiences and trauma
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, verbal and written
• A flexible, proactive and professional approach to your work

As an organisation that works with children and adults at risk we are committed to safeguarding, protecting and promoting the safety of our clients and successful applicants will require an Enhanced Child and Adult with Child Barred DBS Check.

We actively encourage people with personal experience of the criminal justice system or lived experience of the issues facing this client group to apply for this role.

We are an equity and inclusion confident employer. We welcome all applications and we particularly encourage applications from people of the global majority (black, brown, multi- heritage) and those who identify as disabled, neuroexpansive, neurodiverse, with any protected characteristics and/or social barriers or challenges. We value the empowering and informative impact that all lived experiences and diversity of thought can offer the organisation.

St Giles will guarantee to interview all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria set out in the Job Description for the vacancy.

Closing date: 06/01/2025, 11:00pm
Interviews: 14/01/2025