Contract Type: Contract / Temporary

Role Type: Employment

Hours: Part time

Application deadline: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 - 10:00

Based: Flexible

Salary: £ Pro Rata

Salary Type: Fixed Salary

Location: Home-based

Role description: Manager

 

We need your help to grow our transformative climate hope work in the North East and beyond.

We’re looking for a super-organised doer-of-things to work with us. The role is a mix of operations, coordinating our programmes, communications, admin and project management.

 

Key Dates

First Stage Deadline: 10am, Wednesday 24th September

First stage feedback: 5pm, Friday 26th September

Second Stage Task Received: 5pm Friday 26th September

Second Stage Task Deadline: 10am Monday 6th October

Feedback / Invite to Interview:  5pm Wednesday 8th October

Interviews: w/c 20th October

Start date: negotiable

 

Contract Details

Rate / Fee: £280 per day, 28 days work (£8,000 total) 

Period: Fixed Term from September 2025 - June 2026 (approximately) - we are fundraising to make this a longer term role

Location: Remote home working, but based in the North East.

Days / Pattern: totally flexible. This could be a set weekly day / half-days, or spread adhoc

Main Trustee Contact: Tom Agar (Chair of Trustees)

Main Collaborator: Adam Cooper (Director)

Job Summary

We need a creative organiser to help steward our Carbon Heritage strand of work, in collaboration with the range of people and organisations we work with.

You’ll be collaborating with Adam (Threads’ Director) to help make sure that the creative programme and partnerships run well. You’ll be the “organiser” - bringing structure, broken-down deadlines and task flow, extra accountability, and problem-solving. You’ll be in regular touch with our partners and collaborators. 

There’s no barriers or gatekeeping to the creative aspects of the company or how it grows. We’re very deliberately describing this as a “creative organiser”. Yes, you’ll be pushing to keep everything on flow and on timetable, but this is very much about collaborative shaping of the programme and the company alongside Adam.

Carbon Heritage:

Your work will be focussed on our Carbon Heritage programme, which includes:

 

Ancestral Reverb

www.ancestralreverb.com 

Our award-winning Sound / Multimedia project created with Durham coal communities

 

Hereditary Footprint

www.threadsintheground.com/projects/hereditaryfootprint

An incredibly ambitious immersive theatre piece with county-wide community engagement in Carbon Heritage ideas

 

Durham Energy Council / Manifesto

www.threadsintheground.com/projects/durham-energy-council 

A Citizens Assembly on Durham Energy - 30 members of the public, half representing Ancestors, half representing Descendents

 

Responsibilities:

• Build and manage an overarching project plan for the programme: milestones etc. 
• Manage communications and liaise closely with delivery partners for current projects
• Organise and join meetings with partners
• Some event management: agenda, resources, venue, invites, etc
• Supporting fundraising: working with Adam on writing of funding and commission bids

 

Yes, this is for you

The climate, arts, and charity spaces are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and degree educated. We need people from all kinds of backgrounds working together to do the climate work well.

Maybe you come from a background or lived experience where you don’t see people like you doing jobs like this. If this opportunity speaks to you then please apply.

If there’s something we can adjust to make this process properly accessible and welcoming for you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with adam@threadsintheground.com 

 

You can learn about Threads in the Ground by having a look around our website, and / or reading our Impact Framework.

 

A note from our Director

Hi there, my name is Adam, I’m the Director of Threads in the Ground, and I’m very excited to be recruiting a Producer interested in joining us as an eventual long-term staff member to collaborate with me and what will become a growing team.

We are coming up to 2 years of Threads, and that short time has been wild.

From a standing start, we launched a really ambitious creative programme. Highlights include…

 

• We grew a bookshop made from bookshop waste
• We helped volunteers to deep-dive into future food system imaginings and plan meals around the ideas
• We’ve created a multimedia sound piece exploring climate change in conversation with retired coal miners and their families
• Lots more, from talks at big conferences to sausage making to school assemblies to sustainability consultancy and beyond

 

Alongside the creative output we’ve worked in schools, community centres, and festivals. We’ve been on national and regional TV a few times, and featured in the Guardian, BBC news, BBC Radio 4, and a bunch of others. We’ve partnered with and/or been commissioned by everyone from the National Trust to the Festival of Thrift.

 

And we’re almost ready for the next bit. But we need you for that.

I want to grow the beautiful thing that is Threads and to gradually welcome in others who can also take on ownership of it. I need someone to work with me as a close collaborator and shaper of what comes next. To compliment the stuff I’m good at, and take on more of the things I struggle with.

I live with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (and suspected ADHD). Combined with my natural personality (very creative, curious, a bit charismatic, a starter-of-things and connector of people), I can really struggle to be the consistent and reliable person that the charity needs to realise its full potential. I’m not comfortable holding multiple deadlines, project timelines / flow, and keeping the wide array of people we work with always up to speed. Sometimes I drop stuff, I miss Emails, and enthusiastically overcommit, leading to last-minute stress-sprints on project delivery.

Having you on board will help balance that all out whilst also sparking new possibilities.

This contract is a mid-term(ish) freelance role. The focus is on our Carbon Heritage programme (more on that below). But we want to grow your role with us into a permanent position as we have more fundraising successes.

Thanks for taking a look. I can’t wait to get your application and see what happens next.

Read on for the rest!

 

All the best,

Adam.

 

Things we really care about

• Your values fit with Threads and the work we do
• You get stuff done
• You do the balancing act of organising and relationship building
• You think a lot about climate change, nature, the general human crisis we live in
• You’re ready to dedicate yourself to exploring effective climate work 

 

Things we don’t really care about…

• Your CV and personal statement. They’re not a good way to get a sense of someone’s potential
• What formal qualifications or education you have
• Whether you’ve held similar job titles / roles before
• What other organisations you’ve worked for
• How good a “performer” or talker you are in an interview
• How “green” you live: whether you use disposable coffee cups or eat red meat etc

 

Who are we looking for…

• You like organising and stabilising things, But you’re happy being flexible and changing up the plan when neededYou are good with detail - both narrative and numbers
• You’re a storyteller
• You’re probably the person that sorts out friend and family gatherings
• You never miss a deadline
• You have an openness to learning from and collaborating with people from all walks of life
• You’re often the person who makes interesting ideas into a reality 
• You think before immediately saying yes. When you say yes, you always do the thing you’ve committed to
• When you come up against barriers to getting a thing done, you work out your own solutions 
• You’re comfortable disagreeing and being disagreed with. You like the generative back-and-forth
• You love creative, cultural stuff. Whether it’s some crafts, books, festivals…whatever

 

What you get from us

• Regular meet-up to co-work with Adam in a way that suits you: Zoom, co-working space, cafe of choice…whichever you like
• An informal, respectful, non-heirarchical working environment
• Co-agreed schedule of work and deadlines - everything agreed and reviewed collaboratively
• Direct line to Tom, the Chair of the Board, and 1 other Trustee
• 1:1 support from Adam
• 1:1 support from Tom Agar, Chair of the board
• Scheduled progress review meetings every 1 - 2 months. With an emphasis on how you are finding the work, what else / more could be put in place to make it a positive experience for you
• An opened organisational contact book - through Threads you’ll connect and work with genuinely inspirational people working across community and climate. Academics, activists, organisers, funders.
• The joy of helping to mould a really exciting and innovative creative programme
• The experience of helping to shape a young, growing organisation 

 

Application Process

We don’t believe in CVs and Personal Statements as a good method for hiring. Here’s an article we like if you’re interested.

We’ve thought and worked hard to make a process that champions what you can bring, not how confidently you present yourself on a page or interview.

The application is in 3 stages - but that’s to make it easier for you and us. We’re trying to make the earlier stages as easy and light-touch as possible, so that later on only a smaller group of people are having to put in “full application” levels of time and work.

 

Stage One - Light Questions

First step application deadline is 10am, Wednesday 24th September

 

Please complete this application form.

 

We’ll be in touch with you at 5pm, Friday 26th September, to let you know if we want to invite you to the next step or not.

Whether you’re successful or not you’ll hear from us on that day at 5pm. We’ll be sending you the crib-sheet we used for scoring, and your application scores.

 

Stage Two - Tasks

There will then be a second round task designed to take about an hour of your time. This will come out to you at 5pm Friday 26th September and you’ll have until 10am Monday 6th October to finish it.

We’ll then be in touch at 5pm Wednesday 8th October to give feedback, and invite you to interview.

 

Stage Three - Interviews

Interviews will be in-person in Newcastle upon Tyne, on the week of 20th October

You’ll have the opportunity for an informal Zoom meeting hello with our Director, Adam, so that you have a chance to meet a panellist before the day.

Interviews will be 90 minutes long - including a 15 minute tea / comfort break half-way.

When we invite you to a 90 minute interview, we’ll include a set of questions and / or topics we want to talk through.

You’ll be told who will be in the interview with you, you’ll get a short video of each interviewer saying hello.

We’ll also ask you to send us what questions you have for the interviewees. The first 30 minutes of the interview will be your time to lead with questions.Apply for this job