Trustee for Home-Start Wokingham

Do you want to help us improve the lives of parents and young children in Wokingham and surrounding areas?

You could be a trustee for Home-Start Wokingham District, an local charity that gives every child the best possible start in life.

What difference will you make?

What do YOU get as a volunteer trustee with our organisation?

• An opportunity to exercise your strategic planning ideas and skills, probably in a different environment or context
• A chance to expand and implement your understanding of our work
• An opportunity to influence and collectively-lead an organisation supporting local parents
• A chance to augment your experience of charities
• A boost to your career and CV, if needed
• Satisfaction of helping an organisation that supports parents and children, thus giving something back to your community
  
  

What do we get?

• Your strategic skills, knowledge, understanding or experience
• Your abilities to influence plans for our charity’s future
• Enhancement to our overall governance and the Board of trustees; improvement in our charity governance and operational growth
• Your participation in our collective decision-making, contributing to all areas of our charity work
• Your enthusiasm
  
  

What do our beneficiaries get?

• The ability to continue our support for parents with young children
• A forward-looking and agile organisation, with a well-informed and well-managed Board of trustees
  
  

What are we looking for?

Here is some of what we would expect from our trustees; we appreciate you may want to develop more in some of these areas.

• Understanding of the needs of the parents and families that rely on our support, as well as an empathy with their individual situations
• Experience as a parent is obvious useful, but not expected
• Clear commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion, valuing differences to make better decisions and deliver better services for our families
• Experience of committee work, with an understanding of effective (charity or corporate) governance, would be highly welcome although is not a prerequisite
• Strategic vision; good, independent judgement; ability to think creatively, tempered by pragmatism and reality
• Ability to cooperatively work with the team of Trustees, bringing impartiality and objectivity to decision-making
• Skills and ability to listen, even to dissenting views
• Willingness to speak your mind and to challenge other Trustees and employees with good intent; able to make unpopular recommendations to the Board, if necessary
• Skills to analyse proposals, examine their strategic consequences and make concise recommendations
• Commitment to the organisation; willingness and ability to devote the necessary time & effort, including being fully prepared for Trustees’ and associated meetings
• While experience and understanding of charity law and governance can be useful, we strongly welcome people without prior charity Trustee experience in order to increase the diversity of our Board; training in those areas is provided
  
  

What will you be doing?

Set up in 1996, we offer “a lifeline”, a free family support service to families with at least one child under the age of five, provided by volunteers who are parents themselves, to support other parents. That home visiting service is unique in Wokingham Borough, providing compassionate, confidential and non-judgmental help and friendship to local parents struggling to cope with the daily challenges of family life.

We are affiliated to national Home-Start UK, but we are an independent local charity responsible for our own governance and securing our own funding.

Our Board includes people with experience and skills in early years, education and business. We’d expect new trustees to have empathy with our cause and our beneficiaries, but you don't have to be a parent.

With recently-appointed Co-Chairs, we are looking to refresh our Board as some of the trustees who’ve governed us for a while now stand down. If you can think strategically and help us plan long-term, you have the primary skills needed by our trustees and will work collectively with all other Board members. Support from our paid employees is always available, as they will be dealing with the day-to-day running of the organisation.

You don’t necessarily need prior experience of charity trusteeship, as support from local charity-support organisations is always available.  Full induction to our organisation will be provided, plus specialist support as a new trustee, including access to external training.

We are a charity not a business, but we apply business principles to governing our organisation. We are looking for people from a variety of backgrounds to join our charity. We want to expand the diversity of our board, in all meanings of the word, and strongly welcome applications from people from less-represented groups.

We ask for about ten hours of your time per month, which includes all meetings, discussions, etc., many of which are held online. You’ll need access to digital communications, as much of our charity’s business is run that way.