Why Southwark?

Southwark Council is committed to ensuring that residents’ voices and lived experience inform decision making across the organisation.

The Community Insight team, within Strategy, Insight and Performance, brings together consultation and engagement, research, evaluation and voluntary sector partnerships to support evidence-based decision making and stronger relationships with communities.

We are seeking a Community Insight Lead to oversee consultation and engagement activity across the council and strengthen how community insight informs policy and service design.

What You'll Be Doing

In this role you will:

Lead the commissioning and delivery of rich ethnographic research that shares residents’ lived experiences of complex challenges.
Lead the design and delivery of participative decision-making activity such as citizens assemblies.
Develop and promote consistent standards for consultation and community engagement.
Work with services to design inclusive engagement approaches that reach diverse communities.
Ensure insight from consultation and engagement is synthesised and used to inform decision making and directly delivers change.
Build strong relationships with community organisations and voluntary sector partners.
Enable services to incorporate community insight into policy development and service change.

What We're Looking For

We are looking for someone who has:

Experience leading consultation, engagement or community insight work.
Strong understanding of inclusive engagement practice.
Experience working with communities, voluntary organisations or public sector partners.
Strong communication and facilitation skills.
The ability to translate community feedback into actionable insight.

Additional Information

Advert close date: 11:59pm on Sunday 26th April 2026

Guaranteed Interview Scheme:

As part of our commitment to inclusion, we offer guaranteed interviews for specific groups of people. To qualify, you'll need to meet the minimum requirements for the role, and identify with one of the below criteria:

Members of the Armed Forces and veterans
Are currently in care, or have previously been in care
If you consider yourself to be disabled or if you have a long-term health condition

Redeployees will be prioritised for vacancies and interviewed first.

Interim staff are eligible to apply for internal vacancies and include agency workers and those on fixed term contracts.

We are an organisation who is passionate about our people and understands that richness of diversity is a requirement to provide the best possible services to our communities. This is demonstrated through our council-wide ambitious commitment to tackle racial inequality in our communities and workforce through our Southwark Stands Together programme. We particularly welcome applications from members of the Black, Asian and ethnic minority communities to increase representation at senior management level in the Council.

Attachments

Community Insights Lead JD G12 (1).pdf