Case study:Achates Recruits: Upper Norwood Library Trust, Director

Since launching in 2016, Upper Norwood Library Hub (UNLH) has become a has become a home for the social, cultural and economic wellbeing of the Upper Norwood community from their historic building in the Crystal Palace ‘triangle’. Their aim has always been to provide access to arts, culture and lifelong learning locally to many people without the resources to pay and bring disparate elements of the community together, using a hyper-local model to assess community needs and how that informs our activity. UNLH is now an integral part of the South East London cultural ecology, with an established reputation for comedy and drama.

In early 2022, UNLH approached Achates to support them in recruiting a new Director who could lead the organisation through the next phase of their growth and development, re-engineering their programmes and services to create scalable models and programmes that could reach other local communities.

Achates Recruits supported UNLH’s team of mainly locally based Trustees and Chair, helping them to identify the key skills and attributes that they needed for this next phase in their organisational development. We led a search campaign that reached across the performing arts, community organisations and mainstream charity, leading to the appointment of a new director in May 2022.