Support Worker - City Outreach Team

Role: City Outreach Support Worker

Salary / Grade: £28,934 per annum /B

Hours: 37.5 per week

Location: City of London

Contract type: Permanent

Closing date: 19/02/2023

Interview date: 28/02/2023

At Thames Reach we are committed to helping homeless and vulnerable people to live in decent homes, build supportive relationships and lead fulfilling lives. Our vision is to end street homelessness.

We are recruiting for a Support Worker to join our City Outreach Team. City Outreach forms part of a significant part of the borough’s complement of services working with rough sleepers. City Outreach works to rapidly reduce the number of people rough sleeping in the borough, by providing short sharp interventions to support them to access accommodation and ensure that the appropriate support is in place to sustain this.

This role will enable you to use your existing knowledge and experience to move into a role where you will have more influence and responsibility within a team, to work towards quick outcomes, to support rough sleepers off the streets. Working in this team will give you an opportunity to make a real difference to rough sleeping.

Thames Reach welcomes applications from people with transferable skills

You will be responsible for:

• Managing a caseload of rough sleepers, identifying the quickest and most appropriate route off the street, and devising a plan to achieve this, while holding a caseload of your own.
• Conducting regular outreach shifts, sometimes with volunteers.
• Focusing on improving the local response to rough sleeping by coordinating joint working and collaboration between agencies.
• Representing the team at multi-agency meetings such as Task & Targeting meetings.
• Identifying gaps in local provision and researching new pathways off the streets for a variety of rough sleepers, including those with no recourse to public funds.
• Accurately recording all work done.

With the help of our experienced senior staff and management, you will be supported and trained to use your strong communication and creative problem-solving skills, to enable you to create and deliver options for people where these may be hard to find. You will receive regular supervision from experienced staff who will both guide your work and encourage and facilitate your personal development.

To be successful you’ll need to have:

• Experience in working with rough sleepers or vulnerable adults and supporting them to access services.
• Excellent organisation and time management skills in order to remain strongly outcome focused, with the ability to coordinate a high number of cases and complete tasks promptly and efficiently.
• Commitment to working in a challenging environment with the ability to be highly flexible throughout the working day.
• Good communication skills and confidence in public speaking when representing Thames Reach to external organisations and forming strong working relationships with partners; being able to challenge them when required.
• Strong IT skills with the ability use Outlook, online recording systems, Excel, and Word, using a tablet and a smart phone.

This role will involve office and street-based work in the City of London. The role includes working shifts on a rota that covers Monday-Sunday.

We are listed in the top 100 UK Best Workplaces 2022 in the UK. As part of a commitment to our employees we offer:

• Generous holiday allowance – 29 days per year plus 8 public holidays (pro rata).
• Pension – we contribute 6.5% to your pension when you contribute 1.5%.
• Excellent development opportunities – career progression, regular supervision and appraisals, and learning programmes to support your career with Thames Reach.
• Wellbeing support – our 24/7 employee assistance programme and opportunities for TOIL.
• Life assurance – four times your annual salary.
• Critical illness cover.
• Other benefits including interest free season ticket and cycle to work loans.

Thames Reach is committed to achieving a diverse workforce that reflects the communities we serve. We value, respect, and celebrate diversity. We welcome and encourage applicants from all sections of the community regardless of their history of homelessness, sex, race, disability, age, sexual orientation, or religious belief.

For further information: please contact : ross.lambert@thamesreach.org.uk