SOS Caseworker

Wakefield with occasional travel across West Yorkshire

Ref: FDC-242

Are you a driven, collaborative and compassionate individual with a proven track record of working and engaging positively with young offenders or other vulnerable groups?  Do you have strong experience of providing support, advice and advocacy and the ability to assess a client’s needs?

If so, join St Giles as a Caseworker working on our SOS project, a trailblazing ex-offender led project that works across the country with both victims and perpetrators of serious youth violence and other gang-related offences.

About St Giles Trust 
An ambitious, well-established charity that helps people facing adversity to find jobs, homes and the right support they need.  Central to our ethos is our belief that people with first-hand experience of successfully overcoming issues such as an offending background, homelessness, addictions and gang involvement, hold the key to positive change in others.

About this key role

Our successful candidate will assess referred clients, with reference to St Giles Trust assessment practices, and produce support and risk management plans based on these assessments, promoting inter-agency collaboration in the process.  You will also deliver a holistic support service, working independently or with colleagues as the situation dictates, providing a practical service that will include social and housing support, accompanying to appointments, education, training and employment options, benefits work, and debt advice.

We will also count on you to develop and maintain relationships with referral agencies, including police, Youth Offending Teams and Young Offender Institutions, ensuring a steady flow of appropriate referrals onto the scheme, plus regional agencies, including police and social services, in areas where identified county lines activity is taking place.

What we are looking for

• To have worked on an offender-led support project, had personal experience of the criminal justice system, served a prison sentence, or still be serving a prison sentence in a prison within reach of Leeds
• Experience in negotiation with partner agencies to establish links to further aims of the project
• Experience of engaging successfully with challenging people
• A knowledge of ‘County Lines’ (drug distribution networks) and how they operate
• An understanding of the need to use support plans to enable people to successfully access accommodation and support services
• Knowledge of services for offenders and patterns of offending in Leeds borough/s
• Excellent prioritisation, interpersonal and communication skills, both verbal and written
• A flexible, collaborative and professional approach to your work

As an organisation that works with children and adults at risk we are committed to safeguarding, protecting and promoting the safety of our clients and successful applicants will require an Enhanced Child and Adult with Child Barred DBS Check.

We actively encourage people with personal experience of the criminal justice system or lived experience of the issues facing this client group to apply for this role.

In return, you can expect a competitive salary, generous leave allowance, staff pension, flexible working, a mentoring programme, an advice and counselling service, clinical therapist sessions, life insurance (4 x annual salary), duvet days, season ticket loan, employee perks programme, eye care voucher and much more.

We are an equity and inclusion confident employer. We welcome all applications and we particularly encourage applications from people of the global majority (black, brown, multi- heritage) and those who identify as disabled, neuroexpansive, neurodiverse, with any protected characteristics and/or social barriers or challenges. We value the empowering and informative impact that all lived experiences and diversity of thought can offer the organisation.

St Giles will guarantee to interview all disabled applicants who meet the minimum criteria set out in the Job Description for the vacancy.

To apply please request an application form from our HR Team, via the apply button, stating the job title and ref number.

Closing date: 4th October @ 11:45pm.