Roding, Beam and Ingrebourne Catchment Partnership Officer

Salary: £29,000-£36,352 (pro-rata, 0.6 FTE) dependant on experience (Officer Band A Learning – Officer Band B Developing).
Contract length: 0.6 FTE, Part-Time Position. Contract to 31st March 2028, with possibility to extend, subject to funding.
Location: This is a hybrid position with a mixture of working from home, Thames21’s main office at the Guildhall, City of London and site visits across Thames21 catchment areas as required. Occasional working from Thames21’s satellite office at Bow Locks, East London may also be required.
Responsible to: Catchment Partnership Programme Manager

About Thames21

Thames21 is an environmental charity putting healthy rivers at the heart of community life. Through environmental improvements, community engagement, education and advocacy we bring about effective and lasting change by working hand-in-hand with communities to deliver tangible and measurable improvements to our network of rivers.

Diversity at Thames21

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion at Thames21 is key to our success and as such we employ staff from a diverse range of backgrounds, this we feel is key in ensuring that everybody has an equal opportunity and is not treated differently or discriminated against because of their characteristics. We value the voices of our individual employees, and we strive to work in a collaborative, innovative balanced way. The postholder must actively support this.

Purpose of the job

This post will form part of Thames21’s Catchment Partnership team. The successful candidate will co-host the Roding, Beam and Ingrebourne (RBI) Catchment Partnership, alongside Thames Chase Trust, and will be responsible for the partnership’s strategic development and expansion, working towards the successful delivery of the Catchment Based Approach (CaBA) to improve the rivers and wider environment in this catchment.

The RBI Catchment Partnership covers an area of approximately 500km2, including the rural areas of Uttlesford, Brentwood, Epping Forest and Thurrock before reaching the urban stretches of Redbridge, Havering, Barking and Dagenham in north-east London where it borders the tidal Thames.

Main duties and responsibilities

The officer will be expected to deliver across four priority areas:

1. Develop diverse, representative, collaborative and delivery focused partnerships

The successful candidate will need to work autonomously and proactively to seek out and positively engage strategic stakeholders within the RBI catchment area, building the influence and capacity of the Catchment Partnership network to deliver improvements for rivers and local communities. These stakeholders will include (but are not limited to) community groups, landowners, eNGOs, local authorities, government agencies and water companies.

2. Work with partnership networks to identify, develop and fundraise for river catchment improvement projects

Working alongside external partners and Thames21 colleagues, the Catchment Partnership Officer will need to draw on their knowledge of what makes a river catchment healthy to develop ambitious and impactful catchment improvement projects that meet the targets of Thames21’s 5-year plan and the RBI’s Catchment Action Plan. Once identified, the successful candidate will be required to work with relevant Thames21 teams and external partners to successfully fundraise for the development and delivery of these projects.

3. Bring together identified projects into detailed, deliverable catchment and sub-catchment action plans, and monitor progress against these.

The catchment partnership officer will be responsible for developing deliverable catchment and sub-catchment action plans that draw together projects identified across the catchment/sub-catchment area with landowner and stakeholder support. These plans should make the priority projects for delivery clear to external readers and catchment partners, enabling a strategic approach to project delivery in the catchment.

4. Break down silos by sharing information and bringing people together; in a way that is catchment wide, cross boundary and across multiple organisations.

The catchment partnership officer will be expected to share knowledge, news, funding opportunities and project progress between stakeholders through meetings, site visits, email newsletters and quarterly meetings of the whole Catchment Partnership (which the Officer will have the responsibility of arranging, coordinating and chairing, including the production of agendas, minutes and actions). The catchment partnership officer will be expected to communicate the work of their catchment partnership networks externally at relevant forums, including the River Partnerships in London (RiPL) Group, Thames Catchment Forum and strategic community events.

Other duties

Where necessary, the catchment partnership officer may be required to support and lead on the delivery of river improvement projects, managing project deadlines and budgets. Moreover, this job description cannot cover every issue or task that may arise within Thames21; at various times the post-holder will be directed to carry out other reasonable duties in support of other Thames21 activities that are consistent with those in this Job Description. To obtain more information from the Job Description, please visit the link as listed