Back in August 2018, Surviving Economic Abuse was a much smaller organisation, but ambitious and growing fast. The founder, Nicola Sharp-Jeffs, had put together a board of trustees and was beginning to recruit staff. One of the roles to be recruited was a Research and Evaluation Officer. Nicola reached out to Lucy Holmes (then Research Manager at St Mungo’s) for help with the recruitment.
Lucy says: “At St Mungo’s I benefitted from excellent training, and regularly helped with recruitment – shortlisting applications, designing interview tests, interviewing candidates and providing feedback to applicants. Through my CHEW membership, I also had good knowledge of best practice in impact and evaluation work.
“When Nic approached me to help with her recruitment, I was happy to help. I had some flexi time saved up that meant I could ‘donate’ my time, and it was a real pleasure to help a smaller organisation to grow – especially one whose mission I greatly admire.
“When it came to the recruitment, I provided some help with questions, attended the interviews, helped to score and assess, and provided feedback on each candidate. I hope that it was reassuring for Nicola to have a second perspective and my knowledge of charity evaluation. “I’m now a trustee of CHEW and am really keen to encourage members to ask other members for help, and to help others when they can”.
Nicola says: “We were delighted to benefit from Lucy’s expert input in the recruitment of th third member of our team. Having worked with Lucy in the past, I valued and respected her knowledge and experience in research and evaluation. She helped develop the right questions, assess the candidates and ensure we appointed the right person to the role”.
If you have helped another CHEW member, or a member has helped you, we’d love to hear about it. It will help us understand our own impact! Please email us at charityevaluationwg@gmail.com
Many women experience economic abuse within the context of intimate partner violence. It limits their choices and ability to access safety. Surviving Economic Abuse (SEA) is the only UK charity dedicated to raising awareness of economic abuse and transforming responses to it.
According to its 2018-19 Impact Report SEA employed 5 people and its total funds were £327k.
St Mungo’s vision is that everyone has a place to call home and can fulfil their hopes and ambitions.
During 2018-19 St Mungo’s worked with almost 30,000 people who have experienced or were at risk of homelessness and provided a bed and support to 2,850 people each night
According to the 2018-19 annual review, St Mungo’s had a total turnover of £94.5 million, and provided 133 services across 353 sites, supported by more than 1,300 staff and 1,200 volunteers.