Job Description

The Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance CIC is seeking applications from a health or social care practitioner or researcher with specific expertise in health inequalities, to support our strategic commitment to partnership and equity.

Background

The Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance CIC (CHWA) is a national organisation supporting everyone who believes that culture and creativity can transform our health and wellbeing.

CHWA is a crucial organisation for those already working with creativity/culture to support health and wellbeing, for those developing new ideas, and for those who are curious about what this might mean for their own lives. We provide essential centralised resources, networking opportunities and support. But more importantly than anything we are an alliance of organisations and individuals founded on principles of generous cooperation, innovative thinking, and access for all. 

CHWA has two paid staff (one is part-time) and an active Board of six Directors. The Board is observed regularly by a member of our partner organisation, the LENs, who work to ensure the voice of lived experience is central the arts, health and wellbeing movement, and occasionally by our funder, Arts Council England.

CHWA is committed to creating an inclusive and representative board. We want more diversity in our Board, in all its forms, so that we can be more effective for and relevant to those supporting health and wellbeing through culture and creativity.

In line with our ambition to become a more equal Alliance (see our roadmap here), we have been considering our structures and in particular how to flatten our hierarchies. This is based on research that suggests the cultural sector will become a more diverse and representative space once we have more collaborative models of leadership. We are looking for someone who, in the words of the Changing Cultures report, can “work collaboratively and can begin to change organisational cultures to create a new paradigm of leadership”.[1] CHWA’s structures are already to an extent democratic and focused on partnership and consensus-building, but we are keen to explore how collaborative leadership models in the Board and staff of the organisation in particular will help us move forward.

We have a number of experts in culture and creative work on the Board, and while we are keen to recruit a Co-Chair who believes in the value of culture and creativity in relation to health and wellbeing, our main priority is knowledge of and a professional commitment to building equity in health and/or care.