Finance Manager

Start date: 01/09/2024 

About the organisation  

CARAS is a registered charity working with people in south London and beyond who have an asylum or refugee background. Our values are:  

• Kindness. CARAS will nurture all who are part of our community, helping everyone to develop their skills, talents and interests.   

• Justice. CARAS will strive for social justice following a rights-based approach in all of our work and challenging instances when rights are not upheld in wider society.   

• Empowerment. CARAS works alongside people, recognising and respecting their skills and strengths and striving together for better outcomes.   

• ‘With’ not ‘for’. CARAS will put the voices, opinions, experiences and needs of its beneficiaries at the heart of all that we do.   

  CARAS strives to keep community members’ voice at heart of all the decision making, building opportunities for discussion and feedback at every level. We offer training and support for those who want to gain leadership skills and contribute to the running of CARAS. We are members of reward schemes including Jack Petchey, AQA Unit Award Scheme, and we also hold a Gold Quality Mark from London Youth, an Investors in Volunteers quality mark, and we hold membership with the Fundraising Regulator. CARAS is a lively organisation with a highly motivated, friendly and experienced staff team, bolstered by the generous support of equally skilled volunteers and trustees who come from many walks of life.  

   About Fundraising at CARAS  

  CARAS offers holistic early-action support to refugees and people seeking asylum, ensuring individuals have the knowledge, skills and confidence they need to thrive in the UK. Founded in 2008, we have co-created our thriving adult and youth services in partnership with CARAS community members over the last 16 years and now run a thriving weekly provision of social and educational programming delivered alongside wrap-around casework support.  

The growth in our service has been underpinned by great success in fundraising which has allowed us to consistently grow year on year, with our current annual budget now standing at approximately £750,000.  Fundraising is led by the Head of Development and Impact. The creation of the Fundraising Officer role is an exciting new step for CARAS, providing us with the opportunity to get to understand our supporters more deeply, and build meaningful new partnerships with businesses and investors across many sectors to improve the outcomes for individuals with a refugee background across south London. Working together with the Head of Development and Impact, the role with focus on nurturing individual giving, community fundraising, CSR partnerships and building relationships within our local community, increasing our unrestricted income as you go. 

 We are seeking a creative, motivated worker who has ideas for how to support a thriving organisation, helping us build new relationships and partnerships that will support CARAS to maintain and adaptive and iterative approach towards our work to ensure that person-centred support is available when new-arrivals need it most. 

The successful candidate will be a self-starter, skilled at relationship management and familiar to individual giving. They will need to be able to build corporate partnerships, develop and deliver campaigns that drive support from our donor base, create fundraising events that bring our work to life, and build and maintain effective donor stewardship and retention journeys that create proximity to our work. CARAS is intentional within our efforts to include community members throughout all aspects of our work, and the successful candidate must be deeply committed to community member inclusion in a manner that is meaningful and not extractive. 

Additional benefits  

CARAS offers 28 days’ annual leave per year. CARAS also pays into a workplace pension with employers’ contributions currently at 7%. We are a proud member of the Living Wage Foundation, ensuring that all employees at every level are remunerated fairly.  

Hours can be flexible and can include working from home. There are also benefits including discretionary leave available to study or volunteer, an enhance parental leave policy, and the opportunity to take a sabbatical.  

  About the role  

  This role focuses on scaling CARAS’s unrestricted income portfolio, building CARAS’s support base to sustainably increase our income. Working closely with the Head of Development and Impact, this will include:  

• Planning and executing individual campaigns and appeals, including our annual Big Give campaign. 

• Developing a powerful case for support, articulating our work, its impact and the impact donors have. 

• Writing donor communications 

• Developing and delivering effective donor stewardship and retention journeys to retain donors and maximise support. 

• Identifying and cultivating relationships with our local community, building new partnerships with businesses and individuals to unlock giving opportunities. 

• Inspiring an exciting range of community fundraising campaigns run by our supporters, providing help and guidance where necessary. 

• Running fundraising events, bringing program teams and community members together with supporters to bring our work to life. 

• Monitoring the performance and measure critically against targets. 

• Undertaking research to understand who are supports are, their motivations to give, and plan engagement strategies. 

• Managing a donor database. 

The successful candidate will need to be able to work in Tooting for face-to-face meetings.  

     

Person specification  

Essential criteria:  

• Experience successfully managing income streams to grow revenue and deliver results against agreed targets 

 • Excellent communication skills and experience in relationship management  

• Excellent copywriting, creative and proofreading skills  

• Experience reviewing and evaluating data, pulling out trends to inform future work • Experience monitoring and operating within agreed budgets  

• Excellent organisation and administrative skills  

• Excellent attention to detail 

 • Excellent IT Skills  

• Ability to be self-motivated, manage own work and work as part of a team  

• Commitment to the mission and values of the organisation  

• Willingness to learn about issues facing refugees and asylum seekers 

 

 Desirable: 

• Experience or knowledge of issues facing refugee and asylum-seeker groups 

• Experience working with refugee and asylum seeker groups 

• Experience working on individual giving within the charity sector 

• Experience developing donor stewardship and retention strategies 

• Experience building CSR partnerships 

• Knowledge of one or more community languages (including but not limited to Arabic, Somali, Tigrinya, Amharic, Pashto, Dari, Farsi and Kurdish) 

• Experience managing donor databases 

We are particularly interested in receiving applications from individuals with lived experience of the asylum system, whether in the UK or elsewhere. 

Please submit your completed application form by 9am on the 15nd of July 2024.  Complete all sections and include examples where possible. Your examples can include your own lived experience, volunteering roles, education and previous employment.   

  Interviews will take place on Monday 22nd July. Interviews will be in person, hosted at our premises in Tooting, South London.