COMIC RELIEF

Employment Type Contract 15 month Fixed Term Contract
Location Hybrid · London, City of, UK 2 days a week in our London Office
Salary £44,353 - £47,197 (GBP)
Team Funding

Seniority Mid-level

• Closing: 11:55pm, 11th May 2025 BST

JOB DESCRIPTION

This role is offered on a hybrid contract giving you the opportunity to also work from home three days a week.
Comic Relief reserves the right to close the role early if a large number of applications are received.

DESIRABLE CRITERIA:

• Experience working on issues of poverty in the UK, such as in the food insecurity or food poverty sector in the UK
• Demonstrable ability to be a creative thinker that can seek out opportunities to try new methods and approaches, where appropriate.
• Experience of designing and delivering participatory learning interventions with individual, or cohorts of, funded partners.
• Experience of working with both UK and internationally based organisations.
  Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Comic Relief we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive, and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

PURPOSE OF JOB:

The Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Manager is responsible for the delivery of monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) activities, in particular for the Nourish the Nation programme that Comic Relief is funding with Sainsbury’s. Working internally and with the partners we fund in the UK, the successful candidate will be confident developing and implementing MEL frameworks, has experience of commissioning or undertaking a variety of MEL processes and outputs, and is familiar with the challenges and opportunities of feeding evidence and learning into new phases of programmes. In addition to technical MEL experience, you will be interested in the bigger picture, keen to explore wider contexts and drivers of social change. The postholder will need to be driven and focused on delivering an ambitious MEL programme, and able to work as part of a team to deliver essential evidence and learning to our partners.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES

The postholder will be one of two MEL managers and a Senior MEL Manager in our friendly MEL team led by the Head of Impact and Learning, which sits within the wider Funding team. The team works across all of Comic Relief’s funding programmes in the UK and overseas, supporting Portfolio Managers and funded partners to deliver on MEL objectives. The role will predominantly focus on leading the MEL framework for the Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation programme, but will be supported by the MEL team to find opportunities to feed evidence and learning into our internal MEL system. The role may involve other MEL work that comes up on other programmes and/or initiatives.
The Nourish the Nation programme was launched in 2022 to tackle food poverty in the UK which increased during the cost of living crisis. In total, from 2022 to 2025, Nourish the Nation has committed over £12 million in funding to help address food insecurity in the UK.

So far, there have been three main elements of the programme:

• Creating more food secure communities
• Providing good food for all children
• Resolving immediate hunger

Working with national partners, Nourish the Nation funding has been allocated to hundreds of local community groups to carry out this work around the UK. MEL is key to the success of this programme, and there are a number of key activities that need to be delivered, including regular progress reports, an evaluation and two research studies.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Manage and further develop monitoring, evaluation and learning activities related to the Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation programme, and other programmes where necessary
• Manage external consultants to deliver specific evaluation and learning projects as required
• Collaborate with the Funding team to develop and implement learning ambitions and frameworks for the Nourish the Nation programme and use insights generated to inform strategic decision-making
• With Portfolio Managers, support funded partners to monitor, evaluate and learn from their work through progressive, appropriate and proportionate grant reporting processes
• Contribute to the development of our internal MEL system, ensuring that the Nourish the Nation programme feeds into our overall understanding of our progress towards social change and learning about our funding practice
• Creatively find ways to unlock the inherent power of communities and organisations by ensuring that people with lived or learned experience are actively engaged in the way monitoring, evaluation and learning activities are designed, commissioned, implemented and disseminated
• Contribute to internal reports, meetings and strategic planning, ensuring that learning is well documented in a variety of accessible formats, and support with ad hoc queries as they arise
• Contribute to MEL work on initiatives and other programmes as they arise
• Work cross-organisationally to ensure learning is widely and openly disseminated, both internally and externally, so that it meaningfully impacts our own practice and that of the wider sector
• Support the development of new funding partnerships and funding programmes by providing inputs into the overall monitoring, evaluation and learning needs and strategy and advising on MEL