Participation Manager (Lived Experience)

About the role

This is an exciting opportunity to join ATLEU, a leading anti-trafficking and human rights charity. We are looking for an inclusive, creative, talented facilitator, with exceptional leadership and interpersonal skills to be our Participation Manager.

Working closely with our Policy Manager and People and Inclusion Manager this individual will develop and lead ATLEU s work with survivors, helping to facilitate their participation and activism. This is part of a programme to maximise the influence and participation of people with lived experience within ATLEU.

The Participation Manager will facilitate survivors of trafficking to use their experiences to support the development of ATLEU s work and services and to improve policy and practice across the anti-trafficking and legal advice sectors. Working with group members, this individual will be responsible for supporting the expansion of the group (The Changemakers) and the remit of ATLEU s participation work from January 2026 when the current projects come to a close, ensuring new members are inducted and supported to engage and lead in future projects. The overall aim of the participation and activism work is to integrate survivors at all levels within ATLEU, as well as creating a project that offers different levels of engagement, depending on the interests and capacity of individual group members.

The Participation Manager is a key member of the Rise and Lead project team, which is a groundbreaking new employment pathways project in partnership with Southeast and East Asian Centre (SEEAC) and Voice of Domestic Workers for those with experience of human trafficking and migration.

The Participation Manager will be managed by the Policy Manager and will also work closely with the Rise and Lead Project Manager and draw on the experience of our anti-trafficking legal team. The successful candidate will have direct experience of working with vulnerable individuals, ideally survivors of trafficking, a strong understanding of the challenges survivors face and be committed to shifting power to people with lived experience. They will have a flexible approach and understand what empowerment means in its truest sense, allowing the structure of the work to be led by the needs of the group rather than with a predetermined or fixed idea of what this will look like.

About ATLEU

Our vision is a just world where no one is enslaved or exploited.

Our mission is to secure safety, rights and justice for survivors of human trafficking by using and challenging the law.

Our strategic priorities are:

1. To provide a model of high quality holistic legal support to survivors of human trafficking and exploitation
2. To tackle systemic injustice through strategic litigation and pursuing policy change
3. To build survivor leadership and influence within ATLEU and across the sector
4. To strengthen the capacity of advice, frontline and community organisations to meet the needs of survivors
5. To invest in and support our people to ensure we are effective and sustainable

Legal advice is an essential component in obtaining the support, safety and redress that survivors need to move forward, recover and re-integrate. ATLEU works intensively with survivors over several years often assisting with multiple matters, helping to regularise their immigration status, obtain identification as a victim of trafficking, access treatment, support and appropriate housing, and recover compensation.

We work in partnership with frontline organisations and advisers to improve the quality and availability of support and advice available to survivors of trafficking throughout the UK. Each year ATLEU advises and trains hundreds of professionals who work with survivors of trafficking.

We seek to capture and share knowledge and insights gained from our casework, second-tier advice, training and research to inform our future work, support test cases and influence law and policy.

Some of the recent publications that we have led or contributed to include:

• Untapping a power: Why employing survivors matters, ATLEU and the Voice of Domestic Workers July 2025
• Road to Nowhere: The impact of insecure immigration status on survivors, Helen Bamber Foundation, ATLEU and ECPAT July 2025
• It has destroyed me: A legal advice system on the brink, ATLEU October 2022
• Survivors of trafficking and the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, ATLEU November 2020

Although just a small team, ATLEU s work has led to significant changes in law and policy. Since we were established in 2013, we have led the way in ensuring that survivors of trafficking have access to free, independent legal advice by enabling access to legal aid, across the range of issues survivors experience. For example, our litigation against the Legal Aid Agency led to their concession that legal aid provision was insufficient for victims of trafficking and an increase in the number of trafficking compensation cases that legal aid providers were contractually able to assist with each year (from 5 up to 100). Following litigation on behalf of our client LL, the Legal Aid Agency agreed that victims of trafficking were legally entitled to free immigration advice on applying for leave to remain in the UK on the basis of their trafficking experiences and publicised this entitlement.

ATLEU is recognised as a Centre of Excellence by the London Legal Support Trust and was awarded both the Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Award and the Marsh Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Fight Against Modern Slavery Legal Award in 2016. In 2019 ATLEU was nominated for a Legal Aid Lawyer of the Year Award in the access to justice through IT category for ATHUB, its online legal information resource for professionals working with survivors of trafficking.

Employment Information

Job Title: Participation Manager (Lived Experience)

Job Term: Permanent

Location: London based with hybrid working. We can offer flexible working arrangements but the role will require regular office attendance

Hours: 21 hrs per week

Salary Band: £31,374 £37,772 pro rata per year. Starting salary will depend on the level of candidate s experience

Pension: 7% pension contribution

Leave: 33 days a year (including bank holidays), with an increase of 1 day per year for each complete year of service, capped at 30 days plus bank holidays per year (38 days).

Benefits: Individual training budget and employee wellbeing programme

Probation period: 6-month probation period

Reports to: Policy Manager

Objectives of the post

• To lead on the development of ATLEU s participation strategy including a plan for implementation.
• To develop ATLEU s Changemakers expert by experience group so that it is sustainable, resilient and inclusive and able to deliver its strategic objectives.
• To build the power of survivors within ATLEU to influence organisational strategy and decision making and inform ATLEU s services and priorities.

Main Responsibilities

Strategy development

1. Using the framework of ATLEU s 5-year strategic plan, develop ATLEU s participation strategy creating an annual plan to deliver on our organisational vision.

2. Develop and maintain positive relationships across ATLEU s team staying up to date with different areas of organisational work in order to create opportunities for collaboration and coproduction with the Changemakers, finding flexible and creative ways to integrate new opportunities into the annual plan.

Developing ATLEU s Changemakers group

3. Recruit and induct people with lived experience of trafficking to be active participants in the Changemakers.

4. To facilitate meetings of the Changemakers ensuring activities are accessible and inclusive for all participants.

5. To secure opportunities for skills and knowledge development through internal and external training.

6. Conduct needs assessments to identify safeguarding, support needs and development goals and provide practical and emotional support where required.

7. Nurturing the wellbeing and solidarity of the group, providing individual pastoral support, coordinating reflective practice sessions and group activities.

8. Review, adapt, and agree terms of reference and foundational values with the group.

9. To manage the annual lived experience budget.

Building the power of survivors within ATLEU

10. To be an effective liaison between the group and the Director, trustees and wider staff team.

11. Understanding how ATLEU works as an organisation and its key activities and facilitating regular communication between Changemakers and ATLEU s people.

12. Create opportunities for collaboration, co-creation and leadership for ATLEU s Changemakers members.

13. Identifying potential opportunities for Changemakers to take on paid roles within the organisation, defining the scope of the role, recruitment/ selection of individuals for the roles, and supporting individuals to gain experience of working independently (eg. peer research training development, training delivery).

14. To take a creative and flexible approach to working with the group, to understand their priorities and goals and find ways to steer and adapt their ideas so that they can be delivered within an organisational context.

15. Work with ATLEU s Director . click apply for full job details