Peer Mentor

Have you experienced mental health issues? Are you an ex-offender? Would you like to use your experience to help others turn their lives around? We have a number of paid vacancies for people to join us as Peer Mentors and gain experience working with a leading provider of homelessness and housing advice and support while inspiring and motivating others in their own recovery.

**About the Peer Mentor Service**
Shelter is delivering a Peer Mentor Service in partnership with the Forensic Intensive Recovery Support Team (FIRST) within Birmingham and Solihull’s Mental Health Foundation Trust. The FIRST service is a comprehensive recovery focussed multi-disciplinary team addressing the individual needs of our service users through tailored packages of care. It includes Consultant Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Advanced Nurse Practitioners, Community Psychiatric Nurses, Occupational Therapists, Support Workers, Peer Mentors, Substance Use workers and Social Workers. Each service user will have an allocated Care Coordinator and Responsible Clinician who monitor, and review care and support needs and interventions.

The Peer Mentor role will engage with clients on the ward and within the community - with a primary focus on supporting clients with their transition away from staying on the ward to living in the community. The Peer Mentor service’s aim is to help people with multiple and complex needs to enhance the support available through the FIRST Pathway.

**About Shelter**
A home is a fundamental human need, as essential as education or healthcare. Yet millions of people across Britain struggle on a daily basis with homelessness, bad housing conditions, soaring rents, discrimination and the threat of eviction. So, we are striving for change, with individuals, in communities, across society, and leading the way to a safe home. We need ambitious, best-in-class individuals who are passionate about our cause to join us at this exciting time. This is your chance to play a part in the fundamental change we are striving to achieve.

At Shelter we are united by our purpose to defend the right to a safe home. Our enemy is the social injustice at the core of the escalating housing emergency. We believe that to win that fight, we must be representative of the people we are here to help and those who support our movement for change. In all our people decisions, we take pride in being inclusive, fair, equitable and transparent.

We have committed to combat racism both within and outside Shelter and welcome you on our journey to becoming a truly anti-racist organisation.

**About the role**
As a Peer Mentor, you'll support people with mental health concerns who are looking to create sustainable lives in the community by improving engagement with services with a view to sustaining wellbeing and reducing reoffending. Using your own experiences, you will engage with and motivate individuals to set goals around their recovery. This will include building a relationship of trust with individuals and understanding the importance of empowering them to make their own choices. Along the way, you will have the opportunity to access personal support to develop new skills and improve your self-confidence to do the job.

We are happy to talk about flexible working, personal growth, and to promote a workplace where you can be yourself and achieve success based only on your merit.

**About you**
We’re looking for people who have had mental health issues, are ex-offenders or who have been through the criminal justice system. You’ll need to have accessed support services, have an understanding of how these experiences have affected you and be able to tap into these experiences to identify gaps in services and barriers to recovery and how things can be improved. You’ll need to have been stable for at least 18 months and be willing to share details of your successful journey with others to help them.

*Evidence of/ or willingness to receive the below vaccinations are a requirement of this post:

- Tetanus
- Diphtheria
- Polio
- MMR

**How to apply**:
1. Essential: Lived experience of both mental health concerns and offending/ the criminal justice system

2. Desirable: Lived experience of homelessness and substance misuse

3. Experience of achieving goals that you have set in relation to multiple needs and having achieved a level of stability for at least 18 months and be willing to share details of their successful journey with clients

In addition, you will also need to demonstrate how you meet the following behaviours:
1. We enable decision making

2. Work together to achieve our shared purpose

3. Prioritise diversity and have an inclusive and open mindset

**Benefits**
We offer a wide range of benefits, including 30 days of annual leave (pro rata), enhanced family friendly policies, childcare vouchers, pension and interest free travel loans. Our employees also have access to a tenancy deposit loan, cycle to work scheme and an emp