VACANCY: Facilities Lead (Maternity cover)

Application deadline; 3rd July 5pm

Key info:

Turf is Croydon’s homegrown art space; a registered charity set up and run by local artists to support creatives and our local community. Find out more about what we do, our team and our space, visit turf-projects.com/about-turf

This role is to lead on managing our spaces and studios. Turf currently has two meanwhile use ex-retail units in Croydon. Our studio provision is quite small, with around 40-60 studio, desk and community members at a time.

 

Pay & terms:

Contract: Part-time fixed term freelance contract of 12 months. Funding & performance dependent we’d look to extend this role.

Pay: £1312 per month

Hours: 8 days per month, working on days between Wed-Sat (our opening hours). We work 8 hour days including an hour for lunch.

Application Deadline: 3rd July 5pm 2024 – we’ll notify applicants for interview on Thursday 11th July 2024.

Interviews: Thursday 18th July 2024. Let us know if you’re available when you apply. This could be in person or remote, but we’d encourage in person if possible to be able to see the space!


Interview format: Around 30 mins where we’ll ask you some questions about you and your experience. We’ll send interview questions ahead of time, but no special prep is needed! We’ll notify all applicants on the afternoon of the 19th July. We’ll give feedback to all interviewees if you’d like it.

Start date: Thursday 1st August 2024

We will need to do 4 days of training & handover on Thursdays in August.

Working from: Turf Projects, 46-47 Trinity Court, Whitgift Centre, Croydon CR01UQ with some home working (if desired!)

Person spec:

  • Personal connections to & active knowledge of Croydon are essential. Ideally, you’ll be located nearby as you’d be the main point of contact in a space-related emergency.
  • An affinity with Turf’s aims and ethos. We strive to be welcoming, kind, accessible and curious, conscious of our duty to the public and those we work with.
  • Experience of managing spaces, bills, facilities. We’re flexible on what this means – it might mean you’ve managed complicated projects, artist studios, or you might have done similar work in different types of spaces. We mainly want to see that you’re good at juggling and organising many moving pieces – this is a core operational role so being well organised is a must.
  • Practical, technical and willing to get stuck in
  • Strong digital literacy. Letting us know what tools you’re familiar with would be great!
  • Efficient and well organised with a good attention to detail.
  • Confident with numbers – important in managing bills and budgets.
  • You’ll be great at communication and collaborating. You’ll be patient, kind, curious and able to work with individuals and organisations from a wide range of backgrounds and levels of experience.
  • You’ll have an active interest in arts and culture with an awareness of current arts and socio-political discourses (i.e. you like to interrogate things and ask questions!). 
  • Turf is an artist-led space, so we’d love to hear about your artistic practice if you have one. This is important as we all feed into programming at Turf.

 

Key responsibilities

  • Cultivation and management of studio & desk membership schemes, including;
    • Handling studio, desk & community membership enquiries & vacancies, contracts & onboarding.
    • Ongoing management & follow-up care for studio members.
    • Ensuring studio members, empty desks & studios, & studio waiting list are marketed in collaboration with Turf’s Marketing Assistant.
  • General upkeep and maintenance for units including;
    • Managing bills & services for units.
    • Managing facilities-related budgets.
    • Ensuring units are kept clean and tidy and in compliance with health and safety regulations and leases; ensuring insurances, electrical, lighting, fire safety etc is are order and checked regularly. 
    • Management of plans and contractors for any maintenance or building work needed.
    • Organising regular maintenance of Fungus Press sites.
    • Managing team’s shared facilities task rota.
  • Care & oversight for Turf’s other facilities; Ceramics, Library, Archive, equipment.
  • Managing enquiries for & contracting Project Space hires and any short, long term / commercial hires.
  • In collaboration with Turf’s Operations & Development Co-director, assess the viability of additional spaces and facilities to expand Turf’s studio provision to meet demand.
  • Be on call in case of space-related emergencies.
  • Quarterly reporting on facilities management to board.
  • Shared team duties

 

Essential things to know about working at Turf

  • Turf is a registered charity with a board of trustees who oversee our work. You’d need to align with Turf and the Charity Commission’s policies on finance management, code of conduct, conflict of interest, health and safety, equal opportunities & safeguarding.
  • At Turf we;
    • Have mutual accountability processes and collaborative decision making on major decisions. We check in with each other weekly and have a board meeting quarterly.
    • Are all paid equivalent to the same day rate (£164 per day).
    • All share in front of house duties, though we also work in some working from home as possible.
    • Share various rota tasks e.g restocking the loo roll!
  • As an artist-led space, 10% of our time can be used as ‘Wiggle Time’ – wiggle room to spend on activities which are of benefit to both our practices and Turf. It’s a bit like paid personal development time, but geared towards ensuring our practices are interwoven into Turf.
  • Key tools we use are; Google Drive/Sheets, Xero, Asana, Slack – use of these forms the backbone of our accountability processes.

 

Apply

Please apply by 3rd July 5pm to info@turf-projects.com

We’re very flexible on how you apply, you could either;

  • Email us a CV & cover letter.
  • Send us a video intro to you and why you’re interested.
  • Another format!

We don’t have a format we prefer, and your format won’t impact our consideration of your application, so send whatever you’re comfortable with. However, we’ve found that concise applications which break down the person spec and key deliverables and how you fit them are often the most digestible for us!

Please do let us know;

  • When you’d be available for interview on the 18th July (between 10am-5pm)
  • Your connections to Croydon.
  • Turf is an artist-led space, so we’d love to hear about your artistic practice if you have one.

We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and identities of race, gender and disability status.