About the Role

The role of our Chair is to lead the Board of Trustees in the context of the vision, mission, values, strategy and the organisation’s ambitious aspirations for social change.  The Chair ensures that the trustees fulfil their overall responsibility for strategic leadership, governance and appropriate management control of Platfform.

We are looking for a values driven leader who has a demonstrable commitment to our work, and who understands what is wrong with the current system and the dominant mental health narrative. You do not need to have previous experience as a Chair at a charity Board level, but we will require your time and commitment to make the Board work well.

Role Responsibilities

Culture and Values
Relationships
Governance
Accountability
External Activities

Diversity, equality and inclusion

CEO – Ewan Hilton on why being diverse is key to driving change in Platfform.

Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion in the workplace should matter to us all.

Diversity shows everyone is individual and different, equality means equal access to opportunities and inclusion brings a sense of belonging, of feeling respected, and of being valued for who you are – with a level of supportive energy and commitment form others so you can do your best.

With our newly refreshed strategy, we now have two clear drivers for our work:

1. To change the narrative around mental health, offering up an alternative to the dominant paradigm of psychiatric diagnosis. This alternative will focus on the role that trauma, life experiences and socio-economic circumstances have on our mental health and our ability to recover. We do this in pursuit of broadening public perceptions and to transform how people experiencing mental distress can ask for and receive help.
2. To make our ‘helping systems’ work better for people having the toughest time. In the first stages of our strategy, we will focus on mental health, housing, homelessness, and young people’s systems.

Addressing inequalities and being actively anti-racist is something we are serious about, and something we can all do better. We have prioritised this work as the starting point of our Anti-Racism Action Plan. In a refresh to our strategic plan, we have set a new milestone:

By 2024 we will be a visibly more diverse organisation, specifically at governance & leadership levels and, we will have achieved external accreditation in good practice.

As the CEO of Platfform, I think diversity should start at Board level, as that is where change starts and funnels down to everyone in the organisation. With this in mind we are excited to be working in Partnership with Acorn on recruiting a Chairperson to the Board.

The deadline for applications is Monday 31^st May 2021.

For more information, to review the candidate pack, strategy and learn more about the opportunity contact Zoiya Saleem at Acorn Recruitment here.