General Manager
- £32,760 per year
- Closing date – 03 March 2025
- Coventry
The Role: Talking Birds is looking for a General Manager to take care of the company’s finances, office systems and project administration and play a key part in the growth and development of Regenerative Creative Practice at The Nest in Coventry. This role would suit a professional administrator/manager who is excited by the transformative power of the arts and its capacity to effect positive change.
Hours: 0.8FTE (30 hrs based on 37.5 hrs per week)
Contract: Permanent
Salary: £32,760 pro rata (£26,208 for 0.8 FTE)
We are looking for someone who enjoys working as part of a team while being independently motivated to play their part in delivering an ambitious and wide-ranging programme of work. While not an artistic role, the General Manager is a big part of a small team (you’ll be working alongside Co-Artistic Directors Janet Vaughan and Derek Nisbet, and Outdoor Arts Producer Lou Lomas) – and we ask everyone in that team to draw on their knowledge, skills, lived experience and creative ideas in working collectively to shape the company’s vision and deliver its programme – encompassed by the belief that anyone can have ‘the best idea in the room’.
Responsibilities: This role has some very specific areas of responsibility which cut across all our projects and activities, including:
- Financial Planning & Management
- Funding
- Monitoring and evaluation
- Working with our Board
- Company Management & Administration
Please see the Job Pack for more details.
Talking Birds is a theatre company based in Coventry since 1992, known for its thoughtful, playful, resonant, mischievous and transformative meditations on people and place. Our values (Kindness, Brilliance, Transformation, Curiosity, Wellbeing, Collaboration) combined with our ‘six big ideas’ (about artist process & support; access & participation; climate conscience; agency, equity & diversity; nurture & resilience) weave through our work and guide our choices and interactions.
The Nest is our purpose-built creation space and includes multiple studios, rehearsal/workshop/creative, social gathering and office spaces. It has been created with care as home to both Talking Birds’ creative work (including our Outdoor Arts/touring productions) and also to support the local non-building-based artistic community, providing varied opportunities for collaborative and sector development. We put accessibility at the heart of our work and are pioneering affordable, mobile captioning with The Difference Engine.
Work at The Nest – where we are part of the Daimler Powerhouse family of creative companies – models an active commitment to climate justice and equitable, regenerative relationships (with people and planet). Here we explore and share Regenerative Creative Practice with a diverse, climate-conscious community of artists (we call them the Flock) engaged through our Nest Residencies, support network (F13) and Third Fridays programme. In 2021, our Citizens’ Assembly on Arts & Culture (the first of its kind in the UK) convened a cross-section of Coventry people to map out a better future for our city through a series of recommendations, which now guide much of our (hyper-local) activity.