Community Engagement Officer - 6249

The Community Engagement Officer is an exciting role which will work to improve the resilience and awareness of communities at risk of flooding. You will work with residents, public groups, businesses and schools to help them plan and prepare to reduce the impacts of a flood event. The work will help ensure communities have the confidence to take positive action during an emergency and will build the relationships and mutual trust between the community and Category 1 & 2 responders.
You will be required to deliver training and exercises to different audiences, help communities develop flood plans, attract and support local volunteers to manage and enact these plans, help communities network and engage with each other to share best practice while also being able to signpost communities to other useful sources of information. Out of office hours working may be required when delivering this work.
An important aspect of the job will be understanding the community engagement work being carried out by professional partners so that efficiencies can be made through co-ordinating messages and sharing resources. You may also be required to develop innovative methods to overcome barriers to engagement in order to achieve the goal of increasing community resilience.

You will be part of the Flood Resilience Team who are responsible for a wide range of work including ensuring our incident management procedures are as effective as possible, training our duty staff, maintaining our Area Incident Room, managing and improving the Flood Warning Service, co-ordinating our community engagement work and managing our network of Flood Wardens. You will also spend time with our Local Authority partners working closely with their FCRM and Resilience teams.

We’re looking for experienced, enthusiastic and pro-active applicants who have an understanding of community resilience, flood risk management and incident response. You will have experience of working with communities on the ground and will be a good communicator who can interpret and present information to a variety audiences. You’ll be able to describe to us how you have influenced others to take positive action or change a behaviour. You will be adaptable and have the ability to re-prioritise projects and tasks as the situation demands and effectively track and report these changes. We’ll also be looking for evidence that you are self-motivated and able to work independently to deliver work to a high standard.

Closing Date: 25th August 2017 at 23:55 hours

If you would like to know more about the roles please contact Flood Resilience Advisor Phil Taylor on 020 847 46567 or Flood Resilience Team Leader Rachael McFarlane on 020 847 46572.
Interviews for the posts will be held during September 2017.

Listens and questions to understand and engage. Conveys information and ideas clearly, accurately and persuasively through speech and writing.

Presenting a case in a convincing and attractive way that will win people over, encouraging them to follow plans willingly; often succeeding where logic and reason alone would fail.

Consults and collaborates with Customers and Partners effectively through awareness raising, education and combined projects, ensuring buy-in to initiatives and the beneficial promotion of the Environment Agency’s duties and policies.

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