Head of Network Development

Background:

The Start Network is made up of more than 50 aid agencies across five continents. Together, our aim is to transform humanitarian action through innovation, fast funding, early action, and locally driven humanitarian action. We're tackling what we believe are the biggest systemic problems that the sector faces. Problems including slow and reactive funding, centralised decision-making, and an aversion to change mean that people affected by crises around the world do not receive the best help fast enough, and needless suffering results. Our work focuses on responding to these problems. This includes shifting power closer to where crises happen, providing fast, early and predictable function and sharing learning and innovative ways of working.

The Start Network is at a critical point in its journey. We have grown and diversified our membership over the past 10 years. We are now set to evolve into a decentralised “network of networks” by 2025 in line with our vision and principles. We are currently working with five national and regional networks (called hubs) made up of predominantly civil society organisations in Pakistan, DRC, Guatemala, India and the Pacific. They are developing locally owned ways of anticipating and responding to humanitarian crises. We aim to support the emergence and development of further hubs in the coming years. Our ultimate ambition is to devolve leadership, membership, programming, and decision making to the hubs, while the central team transitions to become a service provider.

Requirements:

• Extend trust-building in others by giving them opportunities to lead, the chance to share their perspective and safe space to discuss lessons learnt
• Influence stakeholders to address difficult or complex issues by listening to diverse perspectives, finding common ground and avoiding criticism or complaint
• Generate and support implementation of ideas that have impact at organisational, network and/or humanitarian systems-level by promoting these ideas to relevant internal and external stakeholders
• Enable the Network to develop in a way that embraces diversity and creates space for local and national agencies to gain power by driving the vision, mission and purpose and defending it against those who do not support it
• Identify areas of hidden conflict and work with others to resolve them by showing empathy, avoiding defensiveness, listening to feedback and establishing credibility
• Inspire and motivate others by creating passion around our vision and focus, connecting with humility and empathy, and showing openness and resilience
• Promote a culture that learns and iterates, sharing evidence across the organisation and network by enabling others to establish rhythms and shared spaces
• Set strategic direction and clarity of vision, purpose and culture, enabling space for the team, members, Hubs and other stakeholders to shape the journey
• Work flexibly with teams and hubs in order to have some overlap with UK time zones.