Today I’ll be thinking about recruitment, the skills we’ll need from and possible timescales for a Development Worker.
I suspect this and the architects drawings will take up a lot of Monday night’s meeting tomorrow. The cash from National Lottery is in the bank account.
If we were to get the job description written by mid July we’d be doing well. That means the advert out end July – is that a wise time? Interviews taking place by end of Aug. Start end Sept? Maybe, given it will be a few days a month, there might be scope to start sooner, so say Sept start.
That might be realistic. We should have had decent meetings with the council by then and have a clearer idea of where we stand and what we have to do. We ought to have the SCIO in place by then. We’ll have settled on designs to be tested/costed by our architects and heritage consultant. We’ll have a few more funding application on, principally Scottish Land Fund and Architectural Heritage Fund.
So my first view is we want someone who can represent us in council meetings, skilled in contract negotiations, experienced with heritage building projects. Ideally they’ll have experience of securing funding for such projects too and of course be commercially aware as they might well bring in first clients. If they have experience in community consultation all the better.
If they start in Sept, then the payment for that month will be in Oct. Let’s assume we keep back £2K for costs like IT and expenses and employ them at £1000 per month (40 hours/month) for 8 months. They’d be with us Sept 2021 to April 2022. Hopefully by then we’d have secured more funding to keep them on and increase the hours or, if they wish to move on to the next project, to recruit the person to run and develop the building.
These are the things that play on my mind each day as we try to navigate a project to take Portobello Town Hall into community management. Just light, fluffy things.
Please note, this does not constitute an job advert and might well change significantly in thinking and direction before any job advert is created. Just sharing today’s reflections to keep the blog coming.