Working for Make-A-Wish

Working for Make-A-Wish

We create life-changing wishes that have the power to rescue the magic of childhood and provide an invaluable lifeline to escape the relentless challenges and grueling reality of a life defined by their illness.

Yet we face an urgent challenge.

The demand for wishes is far outpacing our best efforts to keep up, so it’s taking longer than ever to grant once-in-a-lifetime wishes. But the heartbreaking reality is that many families simply can’t wait this long.

We can’t keep asking families to wait for a wish that could bring joy, healing, and strength during their toughest times because for children who don't have long to live, there is no time to wait. When it comes to the dreams of children battling critical illness, they deserve to wish for more than a life defined by their illness.

We’re looking for creative, ambitious people who have a passion for working collaboratively to help us step that much closer to achieving our ambition: to grant a wish for children who might be eligible for a wish.

If you share our passion for this mission, feel a natural affinity with our values and see how you could support us in reaching our goals, please take a look at our current vacancies and send us your application. We'd love to hear from you!

View our current vacancies

What’s it like to work at Make-A-Wish?

Our Values

As an organisation, we're committed to being child-led. Wish children are at the centre of our decision-making and always come first. An example of this is STARboard, our children and young people's board. STARboard brings together a group of young people from across the UK, who’ve had a wish in the last two years and who now play a valuable part in guiding our direction.

Find out more about STARboard

We strive for excellence and have integrity - we are honest and treat everyone with respect.

We want everyone who is part of Make-A-Wish to feel inspired, capable and empowered to help grant life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses. Therefore our values are:

Benefits

You'll also benefit from a work environment providing:

• Competitive salaries
• 26 days annual leave with the option to buy more
• An additional day's leave on your birthday
• Flexible working arrangements
• Access to our Make-A-Wish skills portal
• Access to a pension scheme into which we pay 4% of the value of your monthly salary value
• Two days of additional paid leave a year to volunteer
• Access to wellbeing support, training and events, including a wellbeing and retail discount platform, Mental Health First Aiders and occupational health
• Enhanced maternity pay for eligible employees (12 weeks at 100% of your salary (to include statutory maternity pay due), followed by 27 weeks at SMP)
• Season ticket loan
• Cycle to work initiative

How we work together to grant wishes to critically ill children

Our primary focus is on outcomes rather than time because it's outcomes that help change children’s lives for the better. In summary it means that:

• Within our contracted hours, everyone has their own working pattern and working style that needs to be respected by everyone else. As long as we achieve our objectives, whilst supporting others to achieve theirs, we can work at any time and in any place.
• Nobody needs to ‘look busy’ and everyone is empowered to manage their own time – if you're working too much in any given period of time, you need to take that time back to recuperate – this is not managed by any formal system but relies on trust and individual working closely with their line manager and the rest of the team to find solutions that are best for everyone.
• When we organise meetings, we do it with a plan and a purpose; meetings are here to increase connection and collaboration, not to fill people diaries unnecessarily.
• We support each other beyond our roles as needed e.g. help other teams when they’re exceptionally busy
• Annual leave is for you to rest and re-charge, not to be anxious about return to work so we encourage pre and post-annual leave planning to minimise anxiety around taking time off work.
• Our main working hub is located in Reading, Berkshire. Everyone joining the organisation does so on Reading-based contract (i.e. with Reading being the primary place of work); however we want to attract people from the whole of the UK so we'll only ask you to be in Reading on a regular basis if your role requires it. If that’s the case, it will be specified in the job description. Otherwise, we expect everyone to be in Reading on occasions specified in our meetings’ calendar (approx. 10 times/year, depending on your role). Currently, we reimburse expenses for travelling to Reading on those occasions – it is reviewed on a regular basis and subject to affordability. However, if you travel to Reading only to fulfil your job responsibilities, then we won't reimburse expenses.

We create life-changing wishes that restore the childhood critical illness often takes away, but we can’t do that without looking after our own internal sparkle and magic. All of the above therefore supports what we do.

Work experience

Unfortunately, we’re currently unable to offer work experience or internships. Search our volunteering opportunities to find out if there are any short term or one-off roles available or take a look at our job vacancies.