Recruiting New Trustees

I don’t normally run 2 Blogs on the same overall subject in 2 successive months.

But as Trustees’ Week 2025 has just finished, I feel it is worth following last month’s blog on the role of trustees with a look at the overall need for trustees and how we recruit them.

I have just finished reading David Holdsworth’s excellent speech at the Festival of Trusteeship last week. He makes a number of crucial and very valid points about the state of trusteeship in the UK, not the least of which is the need to get more young trustees on board. I am one of the majority of trustees he mentions who are over 65 – although not, in my case, retired ! Only 8% are under the age of 44 and 1% under the age of 30.

My 2 elder daughters are under the age of 44 and both do voluntary charity work – but not as trustees. This may be because Millennials want an active role in contributing to charity work and see trustees as committee-bound overseers. Perhaps we need to get our message across more effectively and explain that trustees carry out just as important voluntary work as those who perform roles which are perceived as more active – such as driving, gardening, and administrative support tasks.

My only regret is that the good examples of trustee work which David cites all refer to large national charities – Dementia UK, Keep Britain Tidy, the RNLI and the Terrence Higgins Trust. All those charities carry out great work, but they do have advantages, eg. salaried executive teams – whereas many of the charities that Minerva works with are entirely volunteer run or have small executive teams of around 1.5 FTE. These small charities rely on trustees to a far greater extent than larger charities; and arguably the role of their trustees is more crucial because the trustee boards often need to undertake tasks which in large charities would be carried out by the executive team.

A major challenge to trustee recruitment is matching trustees to the types of charities where they would like to volunteer. However, help has arrived in the form of the Royal Voluntary Society’s new Volunteer Platform GoVo – launched earlier this year – which is a quantum leap forward not only in trustee recruitment, but also in matching potential trustees to the charities whose activities particularly attract them.

David emphasised last week the need for “investing in hope.” True – but we need to invest in action too!