Charity registered in Scotland SC034231
Community Transport Development Officer
- Full time
- £29,414 – £32,038
- Remote or Edinburgh Office
- Closing 19th October 2020
Responsible to: DTAS Development & Communications Officer
Hours: 35 hours per week (excluding meal breaks). No overtime paid, but time off in lieu may be taken as appropriate.
Leave entitlement: 25 days p/a, plus 10 public holidays
Period of Employment: Fixed term, 1 year post (with 3 months probationary period). Potential for a further 1 year extension subject to funding.
The purpose of this new post is to create a sustainable umbrella model that will support individual community transport schemes. This could help with costs like insurance, training and maintenance - but would allow the individual communities to ensure that they were introducing a scheme that worked to their community’s needs.
As a result of this pilot project, we will find a sustainable, replicable model that will help other communities to deliver successful schemes.
Context
This post is the result of a partnership between COMO UK, Community Transport Association (Scotland), Energy Savings Trust and Development Trusts Association Scotland (DTAS).
DTAS will employ a full-time a Community Transport Development Officer on a 2 year basis (initially 1 year) to support DTAS members who are delivering or looking to deliver community transport schemes in their areas.
We will identify 5 geographically dispersed areas as a pilot study and work with them to plan, implement and deliver successful, sustainable community transport schemes in their locality. Entrenched rural transport challenges like a lack of public transport and rising fuel costs that are well evidenced, coupled with the fact that independent community car club schemes are expensive to design and deliver.
Role & Responsibilities
The main responsibilities of this role will be to:
- identify a small number of community transport schemes in different parts of Scotland with the potential for development and implementation on a local level.
- build effective multi-agency partnerships to support the development and delivery of these schemes;
- work closely with Development Trusts to develop community transport schemes, provide general advice and support on all aspects of project development and signpost to specialist advice and support where required;
- assist Development Trust to identify and secure funding for initiative and explore innovative ways of resource developments;
- Research and implement shared delivery infrastructure and bulk insurance purchase;
- develop a suite of case studies and other learning materials to help other community groups to apply the approaches taken by the pilot schemes with similar characteristics elsewhere;
- report on the lessons learned and provide recommendations to the project steering group about changes to policy and practice that would make it easier for other groups to undertake similar projects elsewhere; and
- use the lessons learned from the pilot schemes to work with stakeholders to develop an innovative approach for scaling-up community led transport schemes across Scotland.
- this list is not exhaustive and the tasks may differ on occasion when required.
This exciting 2 year post is the result of a partnership between the Scottish Land Commission and the Development Trusts Association Scotland which seeks to address the challenging problem of vacant and derelict land. In particular the post will focus on the smaller derelict sites, which often cause the most harm to local communities, but can equally be well suited to community-led regeneration. Working alongside development trusts or other community organisations, the post-holder will develop practical and innovative approaches to bringing different types of these small and persistently problematic sites back into productive use, in a way that could support and scale-up community led regeneration across Scotland.
The post-holder will be based within DTAS, the national membership organisation for development trusts, and will require to have good experience of delivering community-led regeneration. This is a unique post which will also require good negotiating and communication skills, knowledge of financing projects of this nature, a creative and solutions-focussed approach and the ability to capture and report on the learning from the project.