The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) is recruiting people with recent experience of the UK's immigration system to form an advisory panel.
JCWI’s paid lived experience advisory board will be made up of people who have experience of the UK’s immigration system within the past seven years.
Currently, 40% of its staff and trustee team have lived experience of the UK’s immigration system and many are migrants or children of migrants.
But the charity said it wanted to draw on the “particularly relevant expertise” of people with more recent experience of the UK's “hostile environment and increasingly unjust asylum laws” to play a “pivitol role” in designing its strategy.
“We hope that the new paid board will help us to deeply listen, reflect and respond to the needs of the people we work with, encouraging greater accountability to and power-sharing with the communities we serve,” it said.
The JCWI told Civil Society News: “As an organisation, JCWI is committed to ending the hostile environment and demanding an immigration system that treats people with dignity.
“Through this work, we know that the clients and communities we work with have a deep and personal understanding of our immigration system and are well-placed to guide work to change it.”
Application process
It hopes to start working with the advisory board in early September, and the board will meet once every two weeks for the first three months, and once every three weeks after that.
In the first three months it will work to draft JCWI’s strategy, and after that members will discuss how the charity should put people with lived experience of the immigration system at the front and centre of its work in future.
After 12 months, the board will give recommendations about how JCWI’s work centring people with lived experience should best continue, with board members invited to be part of that work.
Board members will be paid £25 per hour for their time. There will be around 14 meetings during the year. Each meeting will last two hours, with four hours of paid preparation time for each meeting.
The JCWI is looking to hear lots of different views, including from people whose experience of the immigration system has been impacted by things like their sexual orientation, gender identity, experience of living with physical impairments or mental health struggles, and any other factors that applicants feel are relevant to their experience of the UK’s immigration system.
People can apply by email or by voice note, on WhatsApp or Signal, and applicants do not have to apply in English. The quality of an applicants writing or the level of their English will not matter.
Applications must be received by Monday 22 August at 09:00 and the JCWI says it will respond to everybody who applies.
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