How can you manage your trustee responsibilities?
07/02/2023
Charities are facing several challenges, particularly as the cost-of-living pressure bites into donations.
As a trustee, you might be feeling the strain of trying to keep your charity afloat whilst ensuring the charity is run properly.
With the different responsibilities that you have to juggle, knowing how to manage these can be difficult.
What are your responsibilities?
Essentially, you are responsible for making decisions to ensure your charity actively works towards its purpose.
Trustees have six main duties, including:
- Ensuring the charity is carrying out its purpose for public benefit
- Complying with the charity’s governing document
- Acting in the charity’s best interests
- Responsibly managing the charity’s resources
- Acting with care and skill
- Meeting all accounting and reporting requirements
Whilst this may sound straightforward, you need to get a deeper understanding of what these mean in practice.
For instance, as part of your responsibility to act with care, you will need to ensure that safeguarding practices are in place.
You need to have an overview of what every duty entails so that you can balance competing considerations.
How can you navigate these?
Even if you are well-versed in managing your responsibilities, the squeeze on your charity’s finances due to the current economic climate might be diverting your attention.
Whilst managing the charity’s finances is essential to keep your charity running, you must not neglect your other responsibilities.
To help balance this, the Charity Commission has released 5-minute guides that zone in on each of your core responsibilities.
According to the Charity Commission, 94 per cent of trustees who use this guidance found it helpful, yet the number of trustees using them remains low.
Our charity and not-for-profit specialists ensure that you have the most up-to-date guidance on hand to inform your decisions.
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