Shropshire Council is seeking an enthusiastic and appropriately experienced Project Officer to implement the Shared Opportunity Fund Trees Outside Woods (TOW) Pilot Project in Shropshire, as part of an innovative collaboration involving Shropshire Council and four other local authorities across England.
The TOW project is led and co-ordinated nationally by a steering group comprising DEFRA, Natural England and The Tree Council. The project aims to establish several pilot studies and scoping exercises to investigate novel ways to reduce the costs of planting trees outside of woods and enhance the supply of locally produced, bio-secure tree planting stock.? Each of the partner local authorities will lead on a separate pilot project and work collectively on the others. Shropshire Council is the lead authority for the ‘Agroforestry and Orchards’ pilot; other themes include ‘Urban Tree Funding’, ‘Subsidised Tree Schemes’, ‘Community Tree nurseries’ and ‘Hedgerow Trees’.
As Project Officer, you will engage with the farming and agricultural research sectors amongst others, to scope the existing state of agroforestry and orchards in Shropshire and identify potential novel approaches to improve the situation. You will help develop and then implement the pilot project to test, monitor, evaluate and report on suitable approaches and also manage a grant funding programme to deliver the project.
The post is hosted by Shropshire Council within its Tree Team, steered in conjunction with the Ecology and Climate Action Teams, which will provide you with excellent opportunities to work collaboratively with friendly, multi-disciplinary teams of environment professionals. You will also work in a mobile and agile way with colleagues in the Council’s wider Economic Growth Service, and the partner organisations, to facilitate project delivery.
You will have excellent communication skills and IT skills, demonstrable experience of managing partnership projects and budgets and a sound understanding of the issues relating to tree planting outside woodlands, preferably in the context of agroforestry and / or orchard sectors. This is a fixed term post until the end of March 2023.
For an informal discussion about this vacancy, please contact Martin Sutton (01743 254634).
To Apply please go to https://careers.shropshire.gov.uk
Closing date 12 December 2021 at 23.59
