Reach Volunteering awarded £300,000 to help charities with trustee recruitment
Melanie May | 10 May 2018 | News
Reach Volunteering has been awarded more than £300,000 of National Lottery funding to enable it to support over 500 charities with their trustee recruitment.
The funds are intended to help charities increase the expertise and diversity of their trustee boards and Reach Volunteering has set up a project, backed by three years’ of funding from the Big Lottery Fund to support them in this.
The project has four strands:
- Encourage better trustee recruitment
Reach Volunteering will develop materials aimed at encouraging more boards to consider diversity, clarify skills gaps and use open recruitment methods when looking for new trustees. It will collaborate with The Association of Chairs and The Small Charities Coalition to develop effective materials and widen their reach.
- Develop an online service to generate more trustee appointments
Reach Volunteering will keep developing and iterating its service so it can help more charities attract more suitable candidates for their board vacancies.
Advertisement
- Reach out to more charities and more prospective trustees
Reach Volunteering will establish new partnerships with private, public and voluntary sector organisations to encourage more charities to use its service, and to promote trustee vacancies to new audiences.
- Support boards to recruit digital skills
Building on its digital trustees programme, Reach Volunteering will encourage charities to recruit trustees or external advisors with digital expertise to help them explore the opportunities and risks of digital for their charity.
Janet Thorne, CEO of Reach Volunteering said:
“Every charity needs a board of trustees that collectively has the right combination of skills, expertise, lived experience and passion. This enables them to make well-judged decisions about opportunity and risk, and to provide robust support and challenge to the charity’s leadership.
“Recruiting the right team of trustees is one of the most effective ways to strengthen trustee boards, and open recruitment is now a recommendation of the charity Code of Good Governance. We will support more charities to use open recruitment, and to appoint new trustees who will strengthen their boards. Encouraging more charities to recruit in this way signals an openness to a wide range of candidates that is key to attracting people who otherwise might not consider applying for trustee roles.”
About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.