Charity trustees need to understand charities (duh).

If you’re working on poverty reduction, do you want people on your board who are working on poverty creation?

A recent article in Civil Society argues that, when it comes to finding trustees, ‘Lived experience should be equal to professional experience.’

This is absolutely correct - and so often, trustees with so much to offer, but no experience of what governance is really about, are brought on b/Board and left to sink or swim. I’ve seen this in organisations myself - everyone says they need a trustee from ‘the client group’, and then the unlucky candidate is patronised at best, avoided more often, and sinks into silence until they eventually stop turning up. There’s another question, as to whether a Board of trustees is always best place for people to contribute to the direction of the charity. I’m not sure even I want to sit and listen to various specialists hog the talking stick about their own professional area (“look! I know things!”) or pore over a risk register for two hours, so I don’t know why a fifteen year old would want to. Sometimes there are better ways. And when there aren’t - you need to change how you do things to help people get something out of it.

I think there is another point - many boards have a strange belief that the only professional people who can be of any value to them work outside the charity sector. This says a lot about what we think of ourselves. I would like to ask a hedge fund if they would like me to sit on their board - I have loads of transferable skills, and of course I'm very important and clever. I understand money too, and I once saw a video about people with yachts. Would they think I was the right fit?

So why do we have these kinds of people on our boards? (Perhaps if you have billions of pounds of investments - but most charities don't.) So what do they know about what it's like to run a charity, much less to actually experience what it's like to need the help of one? And honestly, given that they are meant to safeguard the mission - do they really share our values?

As we've seen with the Boards in high profile cases of charity collapse, the trustees are often the great and good of industry, politics, and culture, and yet, have absolutely no idea what success or failure looks like.

My advice to any charity seeking trustees would be - look for understanding of what you are doing as well as people who appear to offer outside voices. And it's totally acceptable to question whether people share your values. If you are working on poverty reduction, do you want people on your board who are in charge of poverty creation?

People often have unrealistic and erroneous ideas of what value these kind of corporate big beasts offer to their Board. Small charities fall into the trap of believing that their new hedge fund manager trustee will open up his rolodex full of high net worth donors. If he did, he would be out on his ear in a week, and then what use is he? There is also an assumption that people who manage big numbers will be much better at managing small numbers. It’s actually quite the opposite, and anyone trying to scale a charity knows all too well.

Overall, you need to think about what the best way to involve people from different backgrounds is in your charity. Boards aren’t always the way, but they can be if you manage them right and make real efforts. You can always teach people the mechanics of charity governance, but if people are too far from the mission, and fail to understand the scale and the scope of the enterprise, I’m sceptical as to what value they are really providing.