Lessons learnt from my time as a trustee

Sad to say that the end of my second term as chair of trustees for Community Action for Refugees and Asylum Seekers has come up and I’ll be tapping out after six years.

Concluding that there is no “good” time to step away from an organisation offering such vital support to refugees, I figure that it’s at least a good time to reflect on what I’ve learnt as a trustee and chair.

Invest in the right things

In my time on the board, CARAS went from turning over £227k a year to nearly £700k, with a 40% increase in the number of people we were able to offer support to. There were many factors behind that exponential growth, but there was one that it would not have been possible without - we built a proposal with our forward-thinking patron to fund a fundraiser’s salary and carve out a Managing Director post. If you are lucky enough to be able to focus resources then do not skimp on the roles that are there to constantly look to the future - many growing charities fall down on this point.

Plus, if you are in a position to donate and want to make a genuine difference to an organisation, I cannot recommend enough donating to fundraising capacity. The return on investment could be transformative.

Don’t bank on the unsaid

This was a tough one for me to learn, but people getting along is not the same as people collaborating. Collaboration means defined responsibilities, regular communication and transparency of where decision-making sits. These crucial things are actually more likely to slip up when both sides are able to think “well we agree all the time anyhow,” and taking the buy-in for collaboration for granted can breed complacency about the actual mechanics of it. This is as true of trustees and staff as it is of different teams at work. Get that stuff written down and stay accountable to it.

Strategy and ambition are not synonymous with growth

In my first stretch as a trustee the conversation around whether or not to grow, thought of very narrowly as whether we expanded to multiple site delivery, took over every strategic conversation the board had. It wasted time.

Explicitly ruling out this type of growth with a clear rationale (our fantastic model would be diluted if it was stretched across multiple sites) and redefining growth as our ability to share best practice with other organisations meant that we removed this distraction and were able to focus on more genuinely strategic areas. Plus, not mistaking a couple of good fundraising years for stable growth meant that sustaining ourselves during the pandemic was actually achievable.

Lived experience input is vital and cannot be pinned to just one position

Everyone knows that having engaged trustees with lived experience of your mission is the ultimate goal, and everyone knows how hard it is.

One practical things to share - we created an “honorary trustee” post that allowed members of the CARAS community to input to the board without being a full trustee (many asylum seekers can’t do that legally even if they were in a position to make the commitment). This has enabled input at governance level and successfully been a pipeline to having a lived experience trustee, and at even at minimum it has seen invaluable increased awareness in the rest of the board when there is lived expertise in the room. Happy to share details of it for those interested.

However there’s no single solution - ensuring that the right people can make a meaningful contribution at any level is tough and we’re still trying to get it right.

Board positions cannot achieve lived experience leadership in its own right, particularly in a group whose experiences are constantly changing. To nail this it needs to flow through everything - CARAS’ theory of change process that build how we define ourselves and monitor success was built every step with those that we were here to support. This took a lot of time and capacity, but means that we do not lose time second guessing whether our direction is the right one, and I can confidently say that it is a huge part of why funders and collaborators have been willing to CARAS their time.

Don’t rule yourself out

There is an idea of what a typical trustee looks like i.e. older white men with long careers. I was 26 when I started as a trustee and 28 when I started chairing and I didn’t entirely mess it up. Plenty of our very effective trustees have been younger than me. Don’t rule yourself out just because you are earlier in your career or drawing on experience outside of work.

Final one for chairs of trustees - you are getting good people’s time, use it well and for crying out loud make it enjoyable for them!