Grants Officer

Do you have a passion for supporting community groups to thrive?

We have a fantastic new opportunity to join our Community Investment Team as a Grants Officer. You will facilitate the delivery of an impactful grants programme, investing funding that enables our communities and customers to thrive.

You'll be based out of our Wembley office with maybe some occasional travel in and around the local area. The role will combine both home and office working to ensure a positive work/life balance.

About Sovereign Network Group (SNG)

It's an exciting time to join us as Sovereign have joined forces with Network Homes to form SNG (Sovereign Network Group). Together we provide over 84,000 homes and invest in communities across London and the South of England – our purpose being to provide quality affordable homes and places that people love for generations. We will be creating a Community Foundation, investing £100 million into communities over the next 10 years.

The Role

Reporting into the Funding and Innovation Manager you will lead on contract management, oversight and monitoring and evaluation of our grants and crowdfunding programmes to community groups and customers, with a value of over £350,000 a year. You will be a great communicator and will ensure a high-quality service for applicants and awardees and will track our social impact through robust monitoring.

Responsibilities include:

• Assessing funding applications received, undertaking due diligence and make recommendations to the grants panel.
• Producing high-quality documentation for all panel meetings including providing the panel with accurate and timely data to support decision-making.

• Effectively manage contractors for our grant's programmes including Community Grants, Employment and Skills and grants for customers.
• Deliver a good user experience for grant applicants and awardees and ensure there is consistency across grant programmes.
• Work with the Funding and Innovation Manager and Social Impact Manager and leads in each team to ensure monitoring and evaluation requirements are being delivered through the grants programme that demonstrate our social impact.

• Supporting opportunities via our grant programmes to bring in external funding to benefit SNG communities and customers.

• Working collaboratively across the Community Investment Directorate and with other internal teams ensuring grants programmes meet the priorities of their teams and customers in localities.

What we are looking for

You will have experience in a similar role in the grants space, or experience of working within the funding/charity sector. You'll have a passion for supporting community groups, creating thriving communities and delivering social impact. You'll also have:

• Experience in assessing grant applications.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Proactive and proven stakeholder management skills across all levels of colleague and with external partners.
• Contract management experience.
• Understand and interpret budgets and accounts.
• Being able to prepare and present data in a clear and informative way.
• Ability to validate and impact assess, to escalate data issues as required.
• Knowledge of methods to monitor the quality of data and identify issues.

What you'll receive from us

We have some fantastic benefits on offer at SNG, including:

• £450 flex-pot annually, discounted shopping & cycling scheme
• 25 Days Holiday + Bank Holidays (with an extra day every year up to 30 days)
• Company pension scheme matched up to 12%, life cover at 4x your salary
• Flexible working - we're committed to giving people flexibility as widely as possible
• Options for private medical insurance, dental insurance & critical illness cover

At Sovereign Network Group, we are passionate about inclusion for all and creating a workplace where everyone can thrive. We are committed to our Equality Diversity and Inclusion strategy and believe that you can truly be yourself at SNG. Take a look at our careers site to learn more about us and our values.

This is a great opportunity to join the team as we progress through an exciting period of change. What we do makes a real difference to people's lives and by joining us you can share the satisfaction of doing something that really matters.