Volunteer Community Moderation & Safety officer

This Role Holds the Line Where Community Meets Trauma

Tell My Truth and Shame the Devil C.I.C. is building survivor-centred, community-owned digital spaces where truth-telling, learning, and healing take place. These spaces are powerful — and without strong moderation, they can also become unsafe. The Community Moderation & Safety Lead exists to ensure that our online and digital communities remain safe, boundaried, respectful, and trauma-informed, without becoming policed, silencing, or extractive.

This is not a passive moderation role. It is a systems and safety leadership role.

Purpose of the Role

This role is responsible for:

• Protecting members from harm.
• Preventing retraumatisation.
• Upholding community standards.
• Supporting moderators and volunteers.
• Ensuring safeguarding procedures are followed in real time

The role-holder ensures that the community does not drift into chaos, harm, or uncontained disclosure.

About the role:

To protect members from harm, prevent retraumatisation, and ensure safeguarding procedures are followed in real time.To uphold community standards and support moderators and volunteers to prevent harm, chaos, or uncontained disclosure.

Experience Qualification and Requirements

Essential experience

• Experience in community moderation or community management, online or offline, with responsibility for maintaining healthy and safe spaces.
• Experience working in safeguarding, pastoral care, support, or risk-aware roles, where sensitive conversations and boundaries matter.
• Experience in trauma-informed or survivor-led contexts, or demonstrated ability to communicate safely and respectfully around sensitive topics.
• Experience responding to harmful behaviour, conflict, harassment, or boundary violations, including knowing when to escalate.
• Experience maintaining clear records/logs (incident notes, actions taken, outcomes) with professionalism and attention to confidentiality.

Essential skills

• Strong ability to set and uphold boundaries and community standards consistently, without escalating conflict or causing harm.
• Excellent judgement in identifying risk indicators, prioritising urgent concerns, and following escalation pathways precisely.
• Calm, respectful communication style with the ability to handle challenging conversations and emotionally difficult content.
• Strong written skills for incident documentation, summaries for escalation, and clear guidance to moderators and volunteers.
• Ability to lead and support volunteers: coaching, clarifying decisions, improving consistency, and encouraging good practice.
• High attention to detail and commitment to privacy, safeguarding, and data integrity in all moderation activity.
• Confidence working with systems, checklists, and protocols, and improving them based on what is happening in practice.

Desirable (not essential)

• Experience with youth work, social care, mental health services, or safeguarding-led community organisations.
• Experience moderating forums or social platforms, including handling DMs, comment moderation, and reporting/flagging systems.
• Experience collaborating with safeguarding and content approval teams, or contributing to guidelines and policy development.

Training / qualifications

• Formal safeguarding training is desirable but not essential.
• Training and clear CIC-specific protocols will be provided.

Main Responsibilities/ Key Duties

• Design and oversee community moderation systems across platforms, ensuring consistent standards, clear workflows, and survivor-centred safety practices.
• Develop and maintain community guidelines covering acceptable conduct, boundaries, tone-of-voice, confidentiality expectations, and consequences for breaches.
• Create and manage escalation pathways so volunteers can respond quickly to risk, route concerns correctly, and avoid delays or unsafe handling of disclosures.
• Lead and support volunteer moderators and facilitators through onboarding, coaching, decision support, and ensuring consistent moderation decisions across spaces.
• Monitor community spaces for safeguarding concerns, harmful or abusive language/behaviour, boundary violations, and patterns of escalating risk.
• Act as the first escalation point for high-risk conversations and disclosures that may require safeguarding action, ensuring urgent concerns are prioritised.
• Coordinate closely with key safeguarding stakeholders including the Safeguarding Officer, Content Approval & Safeguarding Coordinator, and Membership Director to align decisions and prevent gaps.
• Take appropriate moderation action in line with protocols (e.g., warnings, content removal, access restrictions, referral/escalation), while maintaining a calm and consistent approach.
• Maintain incident logs and moderation records that are accurate, timely, confidential, and suitable for internal review and accountability.
• Review patterns of harm or risk (themes, repeat users, platform weaknesses, vulnerable moments) and recommend improvements to guidelines, systems, volunteer training, and prevention controls.

This role is not suitable if you:

• Avoid conflict or boundary-setting.
• Want purely creative or social engagement.
• Are seeking unstructured peer support roles.
• Are unable to step back emotionally when required.
• Expect immediate paid employment

Important to Be Clear

This is:

• A volunteer role during the build phase.
• A role with real authority and responsibility.
• Not symbolic — decisions made here directly affect safety

Paid roles will be introduced as funding and sustainability allow.

Next Steps

Shortlisted applicants will be invited to:

• A safeguarding and scenario-based discussion.
• A boundaries and escalation conversation.
• If you believe that community without safety becomes harm, and that moderation is an act of care, not control, this role is for you.

A Final Word

Community safety is about people, not control.

If you know that: Boundaries are a form of care. Consistency prevents harm. Safeguarding is an active responsibility.