Sorry, this vacancy is now closed and applications can’t be submitted!

Chair of Trustees
hear me out

Job Description

Hear Me Out takes music-making into UK immigration detention centres to release the words, music and life stories of people held inside.

Young or old, resident or refugee, 28,000 people every year are locked in UK immigration detention centres with no end date. Their lives are stopped while authorities decide their fate.  People who have fled torture have described detention as the worst experience of their lives.  Meanwhile the detention system, and the experiences of detainees, is little understood by the public. Narratives around immigration are often fraught with anxiety and distrust, ignoring real lives, real experiences, and real human feeling.

We help people inside immigration detention centres to express their humanity through music – to air their losses and fears, their hopes and their dreams.  And we help everyone outside to hear the music and understand the lives of people trapped inside.  We’re working for the day when all migrants are treated with dignity. 

We’re looking for a new Chair of Trustees to add their voice to ours, and see our organisation through a major shift in how we do our work.

Our artists have always created music with, not for, participants in our music sessions.  We are now working to run the organisation the same way as its activities, that is on the basis of co-creation.  We want the decisions we make in our staff team and Board of Trustees to draw as much on lived experience of immigration enforcement, as they do on professional experience.  This means, among other things, getting people with personal experience of detention, asylum, migration or immigration enforcement involved in our organisation at all levels, and changing how we run our Board, to make charity governance less mysterious and more accessible.

So we are looking for a new Chair who can help us take this exciting work forward.  Could this be you?  You need to be a natural or potential leader, but you don’t have to have held a leadership role before, or been a charity Trustee.  You may bring lived experience, or professional experience, or both.  We need someone who can add their voice to ours, bring us fresh thinking, and make our close-knit Board even stronger.  For example, we’re impatient with tokenistic approaches to diversity and would see a Chair who has personal experience of immigration enforcement as a powerful asset.  There is no set way to deliver the role – we are ready to frame it around your ideas and support you.

If you would like to be considered for this role, we need to hear from you by 1pm on Thursday 28th October.

The client requests no contact from agencies or media sales.