New job opportunity – how we designed the role of a Programme Officer
We are currently recruiting for a new Programme Officer, to help us to deliver on our emergent strategy, as we continue to grow. We thought it may be useful to potential applicants to give a little more context on how we have designed this role.
As part of Tudor’s transformation, one of the first roles that we redesigned in 2024 was that of staff who would hold responsibility for making grants.
A traditional grant manager in the UK holds the end-to-end life cycle of a grant. It usually requires the post holder to be able to handle complex proposals, manage relationships through assessment and evaluation, often with a heavy emphasis on reading and writing skills. Depending on the approach and strategy of the funder, a grant manager may be expected to have deep knowledge about a specific issue, and/or be able to carry out assessments based on competitive application processes.
At Tudor, in the early part of our transformation, we wanted to create the conditions to rebuild our grant making through the lens of learning. We therefore found ourselves reimagining the role through a greater emphasis on building relationships and working in partnership. We wanted to move alongside our early grant partners so that we could build longer term strategies together. Our research pointed us in the direction of the program officer role that sits within many foundations in the US. We were particularly taken by some published thinking by the Ford Foundation about reimagining the role.
Our Programme Officer role as it stands today is less about paperwork and assessment across a breadth of applications, towards an emphasis on depth, building relationships and making choices collectively as part of a team. We fund through an ecosystem approach which means designing maps to understand the inter-connectivity between different types of work. No one organisation can tackle the multiple ways in which communities are experiencing the problems in society today, so we are committed to strengthening relationships in the wider field so we can achieve change together.
We are about going deep into systemic and structural change. We believe that for communities to thrive in the long term, we need to lay the foundations for a new system today. One where justice, healing and repair change our relationships with each other and with our planet.
We are genuinely open minded about what makes a strong candidate as we know we can better serve our communities through different perspectives combined with a shared purpose. This shapes how we show up through agreed behaviours and a commitment to shifting power. When making decisions and choices about what we fund, we commit to building collectively, before our individual preferences. For this reason, we do not expect you to have previous grant making experience. We are more interest in you experience and commitment to social justice, and your ability to hold a range of relationships, whilst being analytical and contributing to the core of our work.
Together we are committed to transforming philanthropy and how we prepare in a rapidly changing world.
