NSUN is recruiting: Migration and Rights Policy Officer

Recruitment for this position has now closed.

Contract: funded until September 2024 (2-year post)
Salary: £24,000 per year for a 28 hours working week (FTE £30,000)
Hours: 4 days a week (although enquiries about flexible working are welcomed, including the possibility of undertaking the role as a job share)
Location: work from home (NSUN does not have a physical office). Some occasional travel (usually to London) for team meetings will be required (travel costs are reimbursed)
Deadline: 5pm, Monday the 1st of August 2022
First interviews: Wednesday the 10th of August 2022

As a UK mental health charity, we are a network of people and grassroots groups with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress, and trauma. We come together to create, challenge, and campaign. NSUN is a user-led organisation, and all staff and trustees have lived experience of mental ill-health, distress, or trauma.

As part of our commitment to working towards the redistribution of power and resource in the mental health sector, we want to work in partnership with our members whose experiences and practices lie at the intersection of mental health, racial justice, and migrant justice. We are looking for someone with relevant skills to deliver a rights and migration function within NSUN’s policy team.

This work will have a specific focus on building relationships and working with campaigning groups led by and for people who have ongoing precarious immigration status. It will re-imagine, alongside our members, what equitable policy work might look like in this space, including interrogating practices in evidence, policy, and funding that may keep these grassroots groups precarious.

People with precarious immigration status are widely reported to experience increased levels of mental ill-health/distress, due to many factors, including separation from family, high levels of uncertainty due to immigration status, destitution/poverty, and unsafe/abusive living and working conditions, including in detention centres and accommodation that is a detention centre in all but name. Despite clear evidence of need, mental health campaigns rarely reference the mental health of people with precarious immigration status, including in conversations around racial justice. Policy work in the refugee/migration sector rarely covers mental health.

As a charity which is user-led, with a specific focus on centring marginalised voices, we see this work as bridging the gap between mental health and migration policy work, which are often siloed, leading to the mental health needs of people from racialised communities who have precarious immigration status being side-lined from mainstream mental health policy spaces.

We would particularly welcome applications from individuals from marginalised or racialised communities, those with personal experience of precarious immigration status or the asylum system, and from individuals who do not have a traditional policy or research background.

Job description and person specification

Apply

The application form and equality and diversity monitoring form must be completed and returned to info@nsun.org.uk by 5pm, Monday the 1st of August 2022.

Please note that we do not accept CVs/cover letters. Please make sure that all the information about your skills and experience is included in the application form. We recommend you use the full two pages allowed in the “supporting information” section in the application form to explain how you meet each of the points in the person specification.

If you would like to discuss this role in more detail please contact Mary Sadid, Policy Manager, at mary.sadid@nsun.org.uk.