Comms Programme & Operations Assistant

This role requires that you are resident and have the right to work in the UK.

Purpose of the role

Programme and Operations Assistants are the backbone of the day-to-day running of NEON. The purpose of this role is to ensure Comms Hub operations run smoothly and that the wider org has a dynamic online presence.

The Comm Hub has a busy training schedule with a host of different trainings running throughout the year. Primarily you will support organising in-person and online training, scheduling meetings and helping with administrative tasks across the Hub. For 1 day per week you will be the comms officer for the rest of the organisation. This means working with the rest of the team to schedule and regularly post about NEON’s work on social media, build our social media presence and ensure the NEON website is up to date. The purpose of this role is:

• Ensure NEON’s Communications Hub’s operations run smoothly, simply and effectively - whether that’s organising venue and transport for our flagship Spokesperson Network training, scheduling meetings or organising team away days.
• Work closely especially closely with the Training Programme to ensure broadcast media training, press officer training and our messaging 101 training are well organised and delivered.
• Be the digital comms officer for the wider NEON team. Scheduling posts on social media and ensuring the NEON website is up to date.

Key responsibilities

• Holding the operational and logistical support, and supporting delivery of the external-facing Comms programmes and training - whether that is a half day online broadcast media interview training or a multi-day in person training. This includes managing invoicing & payments for the programmes.
• Providing digital comms support to the wider org. This will include scheduling regular posts across social media channels, ensuring the website is up to date and sending out mail merges to the NEON mailing list.
• Supporting programme Heads and Directors with scheduling programmes and NEON events so that there aren’t big crunch points where multiple programmes are happening all at once, and delivery dates are locked in as far in advance as possible. You’ll also keep our organisational calendar up to date and ensure it’s well-used by the team.
• Carrying out admin tasks associated with the Progressive Comms Network - including adding people to mailing lists, monitoring the community conversations and sending out mail merges.
• Providing ad hoc support to all the Comms programmes, this could include playing a role in the logistics of messaging research, organising a round-table or coalition event, scheduling meetings and booking travel.
• Play an active role in the wider Comms Hub, attending Hub meetings, supporting others in their areas of work and being a positive member of the team. This includes attending training and social events and actively seeking to get to know the wider community that sits around our work.
• Play an active part in the whole NEON team, contributing to organisation-wide plans and attending NEON events, including monthly socials.

Who you are

• You have the skills and drive to do day-to-day ops and programme tasks and want to do them as a regular part of your job. This includes logistics (venue bookings, booking travel for 40+ people, invoicing), and “facilities” work like keeping our office running well and ensuring our team has the equipment they need to work well.
• You are experienced with using a range of IT and tech and are happy to learn new apps and hardware, so that you can get all of your IT tasks done well, whether that’s updating our website, helping the team to use Slack as well as possible, or using other digital platforms.
• You care about organisational culture and people and are committed to improving conditions & processes for the benefit of your colleagues and the wider movement.
• Able to flex between longer term projects, regular cycle work and responsive requests - you are great at being self-motivated in order to push longer projects forward over weeks or months, as well as getting daily or weekly operational tasks done. But you can also shift your workload to turn things around in a day when it’s important.
• You are proactive, well-organised and feel empowered to solve problems yourself when they come up (sometimes described as an “ownership mindset”), as well as balancing this with asking for help when you need it.
• Excellence is important to you and it shows in your work. Whatever you do, you do it to a high standard. To you, it doesn’t matter whether that’s making sure our office plants are all watered, or coordinating all of the logistics for one of our flagship programmes, it will be done excellently and to a deadline.
• A great communicator and you know that good communication is really important to the type of work you do - you’ll be happy to use our internal comms systems (Slack, Google Suite, Asana) to keep everyone in the loop on your work, and you’ll do the same for participants on our programmes via email and phone.
• You’re willing to continuously learn and grow - you have growing levels of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, including around your own power and identity and how that means you relate to others. As a result, you’ll receive feedback from others well (and learn to give feedback well too).
• Committed to NEON’s purpose of building the strength of movements for social, economic and environmental justice, and to learning how to align your actions with the values of NEON: solidarity; generosity and respect and our commitment to anti-oppression.

About us:

NEON is a capacity and infrastructure building organisation that seeks to accelerate the transition to a new economy by building the power of social movements - because without strong social movements we lack the power we need to win. We deliver trainings, develop resources, facilitate collaboration and work in partnership with key movement allies, especially in the climate, housing and migration movements. Our focus is on strengthening the organising, communications and strategy skills of social movement organisations, as well as deepening movement alignment, as we believe these are key to building collective power. As part of our work, we are looking to change the starting point in social movements from “what do we agree on” to “what can we win together?”

We also aim to mirror the change we want to see in social movements in the way we run the organisation internally. To that end, we are committed to building a workplace centred on joy, care and justice, whilst maintaining healthy boundaries of what a workplace is. We do this because it is important to live our values and principles, and because strategically an organisation with a healthy culture and strong foundations ensures we are always one step ahead in the fight for a just and sustainable future.

To build a culture and community that lasts, we organise around three values:

• Solidarity - we’re here to change the system and that requires working together across issues and sectors that aren’t normally in the same room. This means placing anti-oppression at the heart of our work and building the power of people most often affected by injustice to change the leadership of our movements.
• Generosity is about sharing our time, resources and learning with one another as we support each other’s work. It means being open and honest with one another, especially when we hit problems, and thinking creatively about how we positively build from there.
• Respect is the bottom line for all relationships in NEON. It means being respectful of different backgrounds and life experiences and giving space for all voices to be heard. This often means listening more than we talk and being open to changing ourselves as a result of what we hear.

We know that people from certain backgrounds and identities are often excluded in progressive movements and we’re committed to doing what we can to correct this. So:

• we particularly welcome applications from marginalised groups, especially people of colour and other ethnic minorities, people who identify as LGBTQIA, Disabled people and those who identify as working class or have done so in the past.
• we know the work goes way beyond "diversity", it's about making the space inclusive too. So we are continuously working on that at NEON. So far this includes tangible things like a flexible work policy so people have genuine flexibility around where and when they work and a 28 hour week as standard; a gender-neutral parenting/leave policy, an anti-oppression strategy which is held at senior level given how important it is to the organisation. It also includes the day-to-day work of creating psychological safety for everyone at NEON and celebrating the wisdom of black, indigenous, queer, Disabled and other cultures in the way we work and behave.

There are no formal education requirements for this role. As long as you can show us you have the skills we don’t mind where you got them from! Also important to us is your potential to learn and grow in the role so even if you don’t have 100% of the skills listed we want to hear from you.

How to apply

We don’t want to make this process too complicated so please complete this form and send this and a completed Equal Opportunities Monitoring form to jobs@neweconomyorganisers.org.

Dates:

Application deadline: Sunday 14th September 2025, 11.59pm

Interview dates: 1st interviews are scheduled to take place on 1st / 2nd October (online), 2nd interviews are scheduled to take place on 8th / 9th October (in person).

If you fancy a chat about the role or have any questions about NEON in general, you can reach out to Dora Meade via email on jobs@neweconomyorganisers.org.

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