Ben Kernighan
Small voluntary and community organisations never fail to impress me with their ability to instinctively know how to get more "bang for their buck" when it comes to stretching money for frontline services. Their passion and enthusiasm for their cause means they consistently deliver high quality services under the most challenging of circumstances.
While funding is obviously important, the success of any voluntary and community organisation, regardless of its size, is down to the way in which it is governed and led. Funders are increasingly expecting voluntary and community organisations to demonstrate their impact and accountability and expect to see business plans and diversity strategies as part of funding applications.
The recession and impending public sector cuts mean we are facing lean years as a sector and all organisations will need skilled leaders, more than ever, to guide us through this difficult period.
More than a million people are already charity trustees, responsible for everything their organisation does. Yet the role of charity trusteeship is sorely under recognised and many charities – particularly smaller ones – have problems finding and recruiting the right people.
Almost half of all voluntary and community organisations say they are finding it more difficult to recruit now than they did five years ago.
For smaller organisations with few or no paid staff, this can place even greater demands on individual trustees who may be expected to take on a number of roles beyond that of governing the organisation.
NCVO, together with law firm Bates, Wells & Braithwaite and interim management recruitment consultancy Russam GMS, has now launched a specialist trustee recruitment service for small charities, through company Trustees Unlimited. The service enables organisations to tap into candidates with a wide range of backgrounds and experience, filling skills gaps and thereby strengthening boards.
Our advice is that voluntary and community organisations need to take trustee recruitment as seriously as they would staff recruitment. Organisations should look beyond their immediate networks and reach out to a wide group of people as potential trustees.
Historically, many organisations have relied on "word of mouth" to recruit their trustees and this obviously limits the pool of interest for trustee roles and can mean they do not recruit people with the skills and experience they require to govern effectively.
This, of course, poses particular issues for smaller organisations where budgets are extremely tight and spending money on anything other than direct delivery of services can appear to be wrong.
One London-based voluntary organisation told us: "We don't really have a budget line for governance. We've got one for trustee meetings – for sandwiches and so on – does that count?"
If as a sector we want to ensure that we speak with even greater authority when representing our most marginalised communities, we need to invest in trustee recruitment and recognise that finding and keeping trustees is a vital task for all voluntary and community organisations.
I hope that our new service is an affordable way of making this process easier for smaller charities, that have so much to gain from getting leadership right.
Ben Kernighan is deputy chief executive of the National Council for
Voluntary Organisations
For more information visit Trustees Unlimited
