Community Connectors

**Community Connectors (New parents)**

Mercury House, Durham

Permanent, Full Time (37.5 hpw)

Salary £22,500 pa, plus, great benefits

**Empowering customers to live rewarding and happy lives. That’s when it hits home**

We have a fabulous job opportunity for you to join our awesome (and growing) team. The Wellbeing & Recovery Service is part of the newly formed Durham Mental Wellbeing alliance which has been awarded a 7-year contract to support people with mental health and wellbeing issues across County Durham. Our services offer group activities and support along with befriending and volunteering opportunities, working across the County Durham Area. The team is split into three ‘patch’ areas.

Your role will be to develop & deliver a high-quality Community Connector Befriending service. You will support new parents with the challenges they face offering ongoing support, a listening ear, emotional and practical support, looking at childcare needs, managing bills, maximising benefits, support to attend GP appointment and peer groups whilst being empathetic and caring. You’ll have your own caseload of customers to Befriend and support within the local community. You’ll also work closely with our Volunteer Manager to recruit and select volunteer befrienders and ensure there is a thorough and robust selection process in place for potential befrienders. You’ll help to prepare and train befrienders for their role so that they can offer effective support to customers so we can ensure larger service allocations are available.

You’ll complete signups with customers and monitor the befriending relationships to ensure they are operating successfully and that outcomes for the individuals involved are being met.

**About you**

You’re passionate and motivated to help vulnerable people make positive and lasting changes to their lives. You’ll impress us with your ability to work on your own initiative, positively influencing people from all different backgrounds.

You’ll help change our customers’ lives (and our services) for the better by undertaking risk assessments, support planning, goal setting, and regular reviews. You’ll create bespoke and personalised support plans with and for your customers. You’ll also have responsibility for coordinating volunteers on this service and working collaboratively with external agencies, to assess and engage support for our customers.

To make sure our customers are well supported, it’s important that you have worked in a support environment before and have the skills to support new parents.

**About the job**

As our Community Connector (new parents), you’ll be a role model for our customers and volunteers, promoting independence, and opportunities and empowering them to self-manage their mental wellbeing, playing your part by assisting in the delivery of tasks that are based on our customers personal support plans, and their needs and aspirations, making sure they meet safeguarding and confidentiality requirements.

You’ll work with our volunteer manager and external agencies to assess and engage support for our volunteers, building positive and supportive relationships with customers and work with them to develop a person-centred support plan with realistic and positive goals. Empowering our customers to develop the independent living skills they need, to successfully move on.

Together we’ll make a difference

**Where you’ll do your job**

You’ll work across County Durham, liaising with our colleagues and coordinating our volunteers and customers within the community. The great news is that you will have the flexibility of working either from home or in one of our local offices and we’ll give you the technology and kit to make that easy.

As this is a community-based role, you need to be able to drive, as well as having access to a vehicle insured for business purposes. Don’t worry, we’ll pay your expenses to cover this use.

**Working hours**

You will work Mon-Fri however, it’s the team’s unwritten rule that you attend the important appointments in life, be it your child’s school play, your partner’s graduation, or to get your new fridge delivered. You can elect to fit these around your working day or use your flexi to take the time off. Our focus is on getting the job done, not your working hours.

**About our team**

You’ll be working alongside our fabulous team who are super passionate about supporting people to improve their wellbeing and meeting their goals. To us, we're not just a team we’re a ‘work family’.

Our manager is Rachel, she has been with Home Group for 10 years carrying out many different roles across many services, she has a vast experience of supporting customers and staff.

There are 14 of us in the team and 20 across the wider team and we don’t just love to support our customers, we’re there for each other too. John has been with Home Group for just under 10 years and has great knowle