Being a Trustee
We are inviting you to follow our new Quaker A-Z blog series – for 2024 the MBS focus for the series is being a trustee. Every other Friday we will post brief snippets of trustee focused information following the #QuakerAlphabetProject. Each post will reflect on each letter of the alphabet from an MBS perspective.
The Quaker Alphabet blog project was started in 2013 by Rhiannon Grant, Stephanie Grant and Gil Skidmore. Quakers from all walks of life came together to share ideas. Each blog post focuses on a new topic and is published in alphabetical order. It is an opportunity for us to come together by commenting and sharing our thoughts on the subject.
''Charity trustees' means the persons having the general control and management of the administration of a charity'.
How to be a Trustee
Legally, a trustee is someone who has formal responsibility for the charity – and therefore must act in the charities best interest. This is the same no matter how they’ve become a trustee – elected or appointed. A trustee may take on specific roles or tasks for the charity, but the over all responsibility is held with the full body.
The charity should have a governing document, or some other form of agreed wording, and the trustee’s roles and responsibilities should be laid out in a role description or similar.
What's in a name?
Quakers don’t have ‘chairs’ for their committees, instead we have ‘clerks’ (where we focused in last year’s A-Z).
Trustees can be called
- directors
- board members
- governors
- committee members
However, whatever you call the role the tasks and responsibilities are similar. And this is what we’re planning to explore throughout 2024.
Trustees have overall control of a charity and are responsible for making sure it’s doing what it was set up to do. ....Whatever they are called, trustees are the people who lead the charity and decide how it is run.
