IMIX Future plans – a message from our Chief Executive

‘We will always be responsive to the external environment and will respond to emerging issues.’

This autumn we celebrate our second anniversary as a charity, a lot has changed over the last two years; understanding how to influence an 80-seat majority government and the COVID-19 pandemic being just a couple of the challenges we’ve faced.

As an organisation committed to supporting others, following our first annual report, we reviewed and refreshed our organisational strategy to ensure we continue to meet the needs of the sector and our media partners. One of the hardest discussions the staff team and trustees had was about prioritisation. As a small but -we like to think- effective team, we cannot do everything, so we made some decisions about how we are going to work over the coming months and what we are going to prioritise. Core to our work will be the need to place stories through the media.  

Training and development  

We know from an external evaluation of our work that the migration sector values our training and development offer as well as the bespoke support we give people to tell their stories to the media. However, we also know that people often need to be ‘trained’ more than once to build their confidence to speak out.  

To this end we’ve created two new programmes of work; a series of masterclasses, open to anyone in the sector, which give a taster of key issues such as how to handle a media crisis and writing a blog; and an expert by experience programme which helps those who have experienced the immigration system build the confidence to use various channels to advocate for change.  

We will still provide training to groups on request, but we will expect people to have attended a masterclass before receiving in-depth training.  

Campaign focus

While we will always be responsive to the external environment and will respond to emerging issues such as the crisis in Afghanistan, we can’t respond to every agenda – even though we’d really like to! Having considered the external landscape, we have agreed to invest more time in the following: supporting the Together with Refugees campaign, working with journalists to expose the dangers around trafficking and modern slavery and creating new narratives on refugee protection and destitution. We will also continue to work with journalists on channel crossings. 

Leadership 

IMIX is in good shape from a financial perspective, our funds come from a pool of committed donors who understand the complexity of migration and what it takes to change public opinion. We have a strong, diverse board who help navigate the team through tricky decisions and a fantastic staff team who bring energy to every challenge and opportunity. It’s for all these reasons that I feel it’s the right time for me to move on from IMIX, which means my brilliant job is up for grabs. 

Job descriptions can be a helpful guide to a role, and this blog contains all the essential information you need to apply, but if you are interested and want to know more drop me a line and we can chat: emma.harrison@imix.org.uk