Improving Trustee Board Governance
Trustees – your M&As plainly state what business the charity can do but a Trustee Board Charter enables you to agree between yourselves and your stakeholders how you plan and carry out your business.
Today I have been developing a series of tools, templates and workshop content to enable the creation of a Trustee Board Charter for the charity of which I’m the Chair.
This has included:
Designing a pre-workshop questionnaire (to capture insights from the introverts).
Designing the structure and content for a 3.5 workshop that I’ll be facilitating.
Proposing a process to manage the expectations between Board and Staff and ensure buy-in to the final content of the charter through debate, negotiations and agreements.
Creating a template Charter document for completion after the workshop.
Creating a template document for Terms of Reference for sub-committees that link back up to the TB Charter.
All of the above has had to consider the following:
Accessibility and consideration of clients’ needs
Moving towards a democratic member-led charity model of Governance
Efficiency
Effectiveness
Enjoyment
Buy-in
I’ve already received some great feedback on the pre-workshop questionnaires from my fellow Trustees and have incorporated this into the workshop sessions. I’m confident that we’ll have all our key Governance documents reviewed and approved over the next few months so we can start recruiting new Trustees in June (as planned). I am really looking forward to Thursday when we can all get together and start to put some flesh on the bones.
Lesson today is: If you start off the day feeling like you’re wading through treacle, go for a 5K walk at a swift pace to get the spring back in your step and to kick-start your brain.