By 
Nesta
London
England
2020-10-22T19:05:55Z
London/Home Based
Nesta is looking for a Mission Director, Healthy Lives to lead our efforts to reduce health inequalities in the UK.
About Nesta
Our vision is that by 2030, Nesta will have improved the lives of millions of people by designing, testing and scaling new solutions to society’s biggest challenges.
We have chosen to focus on three guiding missions – equalising life chances, building healthier lives, and supporting a sustainable economic recovery. In each of these areas, we will partner with frontline organisations to generate and rigorously evaluate new interventions, and support their widespread adoption. We will support the creation of new products and ventures, and shape the system as a whole to support innovation.
Working with a range of delivery partners, we will deploy multi-disciplinary teams that bring together capabilities in design, data science, behavioural insights, and experimental research. We believe that by bringing together innovation methods to design, experiment, rigorously evaluate, and scale innovations, we can drive innovation for social good.
About this pivotal role
The poorest people in the UK die almost a decade before their more affluent counterparts, and experience ill-health almost twenty years sooner. At Nesta, our aim is to substantially narrow this gap over the next decade. To get there, we will be focusing on two of the biggest drivers of lost years of healthy life: obesity, caused by unhealthy food environments, and loneliness.
As Mission Director, you will think critically about how to tackle this challenge, and work towards practical solutions that help ensure healthier lives. You will lead a multidisciplinary team to form long-term partnerships, generate new ideas, experiment with potential solutions, and scale up what works. You will also:
- Oversee and guide large-scale complex programmes of work, ensuring focus on the strategic goal
- Represent Nesta to a range of externally audiences and act as an expert voice on food environments, obesity and loneliness
- Help develop an organisational culture of mixed-methods innovation, in which skills are combined in new ways to produce better outcomes; and champion an organisational culture of exploration, learning, development, and rigour
- Contribute to development and delivery of our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion goals, particularly in relation to the health outcomes we focus on
What we are looking for
You are curious about new methods, open to contributions and ideas from all sources, and keen to push the pace and scale of our impact. You have a track record in leading programmes that deliver social impact, taking an empirical approach and ensuring results. You have demonstrable experience leading effective teams, and are a strong broker who can bring together the right mix of skills for every project.
Closing date: 2nd of November 2020 at 8am. First interviews will take place w/c 9 November 2020. Second interviews will take place w/c 16 November 2020.
At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organisation that is more innovative, more creative and gets better results.
We want our workforce to represent the diversity of the people and communities we serve. We also want our workplace to be one where different experiences, expertise and perspectives are valued, and where everyone is encouraged to grow and develop.
This means that when we are recruiting, we actively seek to reach a diverse pool of candidates. It also means that we are happy to consider any reasonable adjustments that potential employees may need to in order to be successful.
We recognise the importance of a good balance between work and home life, so we do everything we can to accommodate flexible working, including working from home, compressed or part-time hours, job shares and other arrangements.
Please just let us know in your application or at any stage throughout the process (and beyond) if these are options you’d like to explore.
