Communications & Narrative Steward in Wincanton

Salary: £30,000-£32,500 per annum, depending on experience.

Location: North-Mid Dorset/South Somerset.

Contract: 12-month fixed-term contract with a view to renew.

First-stage conversations: Likely to take place on Tuesday, 4 August 2026.

Interviews: Likely to take place on Tuesday, 11 August 2026.

Start date: Ideally early September. Please hold 4 and 11 August if you can. If you already know you won't be available on either of these dates, please let us know in your application. This won't count against you. We're aiming for the successful candidate to start on 7 September. Depending on availability, there may also be an opportunity for one or two paid days in August to spend time with our current Communications and Engagement Coordinator and support a smooth handover.

About This Living Place: This Living Place is a community-led organisation exploring what it takes to restore community agency in a time of profound social, ecological and economic change. Founded in 2024, we're a small and evolving team rooted across rural Somerset, Dorset and Devon. Through practical work in the places where we live, we work alongside communities to help them shape their futures. Our rural context really matters. Much of our work over the next few years will explore the future of rural places and economies: and how communities can have greater agency in shaping what comes next. We don't believe rural places should only be places where work is delivered from elsewhere. We want to help build meaningful work, skills, relationships and institutions within the places themselves. That's part of why we want our team to be rooted here too: living within this geography changes what we notice, the relationships we build and the questions we ask.

Alongside our local and regional work, we convene the Living Places Network: a growing community of practitioners from across the UK who are exploring community-led, place-based approaches to change. Our work happens across three deeply connected scales: local, regional and national. Locally, we're rooted in our own places, building relationships, supporting practical projects and learning through doing. Regionally, we connect people and places across our wider bioregion, helping knowledge, relationships and resources travel between communities. Nationally, the Living Places Network brings practitioners together to learn from one another, share what they're discovering and build stronger infrastructure for community‑led change. We're still a young organisation. Our team is small, much of what we're building is still evolving, and there is real space to shape how we work and where we go next. We also have ambitious and exciting plans for the future.

Why This Role Exists: Over the past year, we've built strong foundations for our communications: developing our visual identity and tone of voice, redesigning our website, and establishing systems, rhythms and more consistent storytelling. So, this isn't a role where you'll be starting from scratch. There's a strong foundation to build from, and we're looking for someone excited to take the work into its next phase. For us, that next phase is about going deeper. We don't see communications simply as the creation of outputs. We're interested in the stories and narratives that shape how people understand the world, hold existing systems in place and influence what we believe is possible. Our work is increasingly asking: What are the stories shaping our places? Which stories are keeping systems that no longer serve communities in place? Which alternatives are already emerging, but remain unseen or disconnected? How can communications help people see, understand and participate in something different? Accessibility is central to this. We don't exist to speak only to people who already know the language of systems change, community agency or social and ecological transition. We want to make complex and sometimes difficult ideas part of everyday conversation. That means thinking deeply about who we're trying to reach. How does this connect to someone's life? How do we communicate in ways that invite people in? Whether we're talking about the future of rural economies, community energy, housing, food systems or the stories shaping our places, we want to help people understand why it matters to them - and feel that they can be part of what happens next.

This is a strategic role, but it is also an inherently practical one. You'll write, design, interview, photograph, make, publish and create. But we want you to hold the bigger picture too: to think about why we're communicating, who we're trying to reach, what needs to shift, and how an individual story, article, event or Instagram post contributes to wider change. We're looking for someone who wants to grow not only as a communicator, but as a narrative practitioner.

What You'll Do: This role combines strategic thinking with practical delivery. You might spend one day interviewing people, visiting a project or capturing stories at a community event. On another, you might be writing an article, developing a communications strategy, designing social media content or helping a partner think through how they need to engage different groups of people. The list below is deliberately broad, and we don't expect you to arrive with experience in all of it. You'll be joining a team with significant experience in communications, storytelling, narrative and systems thinking, including directors who have spent many years working in these areas. You'll have support to learn, experiment and deepen your practice alongside us. What matters is that you already have a strong foundation in communications or storytelling, can make and deliver high-quality work, and are excited to grow into the more strategic and emerging parts of the role.

Find the full job description and more details here: https://www.thislivingplace.co.uk/join-the-team