Careers

Programme and Impact Lead 

• Reports to: Assistant Director of Impact, Programmes and Partnerships 
• Salary: £54,000 
• Contract: 1 – year fixed term 
• Location: Central London, Hybrid* 
• Application Deadline: 12pm on Tuesday 15^th April 2025  
• Interviews: commencing the week of 28^th April 2025 

About the Youth Endowment Fund 

We’re here to prevent children from becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to change things.  

In recent years, violent crime involving children has increased. This is a tragedy. Every child is an important member of our community and society has a duty to protect them.  

The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) is a charity with a £200m endowment that exists to prevent children from becoming involved in violence. We will achieve this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice. To make this happen we fund, evaluate and then spread the very best work on reducing violence affected young people across England and Wales. 

Central to all of this to is two key tasks: firstly, deciding which initiatives we should fund and evaluate and secondly, ensuring we do this excellently. Our Programmes Team is central to getting this done. This team is responsible for planning specific rounds of funding that will fill evidence gaps and identifying, assessing, funding and supporting initiatives designed to prevent violence affecting young people. This way we build evidence on what works so that we can change national practice and policies.  

Key responsibilities 

You are a key member of the Programmes team. As a Programme and Impact Lead, you will line manage Programme Managers and be responsible for managing some of our larger grant awards, that include more complex evaluation designs. You’ll be responsible for making sure our delivery organisations can effectively engage with robust, independent evaluations, so we have the best chance of generating valuable learning from a round. And you may also be responsible for directly managing our independent evaluators as well. 

You must have a strong understanding of evaluation methodologies and challenges organisations face in delivery. You must also be a brilliant project manager, great at managing and developing people and external stakeholders, energised by tackling complex problems and really care about the YEF’s mission to build evidence of what works.  

Your main responsibilities boil down to these. You’ll:  

Manage large-scale complex projects 

You’ll be responsible for managing programmes of a significant size and complexity. You’ll draw on your experience of managing large scale projects and knowledge of evaluations to overcome unexpected challenges. You’ll balance logic and intuition to guide partners and colleagues through the inevitable undulations of complex projects and feel comfortable making decisions when there’s too much or too little information. You’ll ensure projects maintain a strong alignment to the original aims and objectives of the funding round. 

Provide leadership to the Programmes Team and strategic advice to the Assistant Director of Impact, Programmes and Partnerships  

Along with other Programme and Impact leads, you’ll deputise for the Assistant Director of Impact, Programmes and Partnerships.

Lead strategic areas of work  

You’ll develop and embed a clear strategy for distinctive areas of work that will enable us to achieve our mission. This includes:  

Win people over externally 

You’ll meet people externally and share what we’re doing, why we care about it, being open and transparent about what we know and what we don’t know. You’ll share progress updates with key stakeholders, and you’ll represent YEF at external meetings, steering groups and committees. You’ll manage strategic relationships with co-funders, which may include partnerships with government departments. You’re likely to have frequent contact with civil servants, charity leaders and staff, academics and practitioners.  

Line management 

Your role may involve the line management of Programme Managers. This will include supporting and enhancing their overall professional growth, providing mentoring and coaching opportunities as appropriate and serving as a source of consultation and a point of escalation for your team members as they manage projects in their portfolio. 

Support delivery organisations to take part in robust evaluation 

You’ll make sure the team are excellent at supporting delivery organisations to engage with robust evaluation. You’ll help organisations identify the challenges and mitigations associated with embedding an evaluation approach in their project and delivery. This includes helping them understand the importance of having excellent monitoring and quality assurance systems and process and ensuring they are comfortable engaging in open and honest conversations with evaluators to ensure the project and evaluation are the very best they can be. 

To apply 

Please click on the “Apply for this” button and submit your CV, your completed monitoring form and cover letter, which must answer the following two questions below. Please submit your application by 12pm on Tuesday 15^th April. 

Application Questions  

1. Can you share an example of when you’ve worked with a delivery organisation to support them in taking part in a rigorous evaluation – for example, explaining the importance of randomisation, or facilitating data collection of validated outcome measures? What was the context, the issue you helped them to overcome, and the outcome? 
2. Can you give an example of when you have had to manage multiple partners in a project and resolve conflicting positions? Can you explain how you went about this and what the outcome was?