Volunteer Community Lead

Switchboard’s listening service is available to all LGBTQIA+ communities in the UK. It offers a safe space for anyone to discuss anything, including topics such as sexuality, gender identity, sexual health, and emotional well-being and more. Handling over 17,000 conversations each year, their services continue to be in high demand, with their network of volunteers offering a vital service to people across the country in times of need, but also proving incredible insights into the issues that impact the LGBTQIA+ community the most.

Since 2021 the organisation has been on a journey to establish a staff team to oversee day-to-day operations within the charity. They are now looking to introduce this new role as they grow throughout 2024 to a team of 11.

Prospectus is delighted to be supporting Switchboard as they look to appoint a Volunteer Community Lead to join the organisation.

This position is offered on a full-time, hybrid basis with 2 days working in the London office a week and the remaining flexibly from home.


The role:

This brand-new role sits within the staff team at Switchboard and reports directly to the Head of Volunteering and Training. The post will work closely with key volunteer-led operational teams. As the charity looks to cover its rota more effectively, they are working towards recruiting and training around 100 new volunteers in 2024, taking the total membership to around 350. This number will continue to grow each year, until they are able to handle ALL of the calls, IMs and emails the service receives.

With this in mind, Switchboard wants to ensure they not only retain new volunteers for a number of years, but that each volunteer books regular shifts, are looked after and feel welcomed and an important part of an active, vibrant and inclusive community.

This role reports into the Head of Volunteering and Training and oversees four main areas: volunteer socials, wellbeing initiatives, celebrations and EDI endeavours. This role is key to ensuring the charity retains, nurtures and engages volunteers within Switchboard, and that they create a community of volunteers which reflects the rich diversity of the wider LGBTQIA+ community.

This vital role will entail, delivering a range of in-person and online engagement events throughout the year, managing the Pride activations for 2025 and onwards, overseeing Switchboard’s programme of volunteer celebrations, managing wellbeing initiatives and ensuring Switchboard continues to celebrate being  a rich, diverse and inclusive organisation.


The person:

The successful candidate will have extensive experience of organising and producing social and professional events of all shapes and sizes. They will have strong exposure to EDI initiatives and will have a natural interest, or actual experience in promoting wellbeing in the work-place.

This person will have outstanding people skills as the soft skill aspects of this role will be absolutely critical to its success. It will be important that this person demonstrates a broad understanding of the issues and challenges people from the LGBTQIA+ community face in their everyday lives. Similarly, this person will need to appreciate that these issues and challenges will also be faced by Switchboard’s community of volunteers as a result.

You will have extensive experience of organising social gatherings in a professional or volunteering setting, both large and small, collating and analysing data to measure effectiveness & impact, managing third party supplier & contractor relationships, in addition to having a collaborative, communicative & empathetic approach to mobilising networks and driving forward levels of customer service and Volunteer experience.

This person will be comfortable with public speaking and engaging audiences, will be highly organised and above all, fully committed to the work of Switchboard, becoming a natural advocate for the organisation both internally and externally as a result. This person will need to be able to manage all in-person events, wherever they are based, so some locational flexibility will be required.


Switchboard is committed to growing a team which reflects the communities it serves, so they actively encourage applications from candidates with lived experience and from all marginalised communities.