Celebrating the 9th cohort of Oxford Hub’s Trustee Programme

To mark Trustees week, we want to celebrate the start of the latest cohort of Oxford Hub’s Trustee Programme! This year we have decided to do things a little differently, building on the successes of our young trustee programme to a wider definition of board diversity.

What we have learned from the Young Trustee Programme:

Since 2016 we have run the Young Trustee Programme, placing 97 young people on local charity boards as trustees to date. Participants on the programme undertake training with Oxford Hub in trusteeship, and and we’re proud that they have made a significant contribution to diversifying local boards

Through running eight cohorts of the Trustee Programme, we’ve developed some key learnings which have shaped the course of how we hope to run it in the future:

1. Young people bring more diversity than the average trustee, but we recognise that this is not enough. Participants on the programme have from a wide range of backgrounds in terms of their ethnicity, class and sexual orientation especially, but were often still young professionals already working in social impact organisations. In some ways, we were replicating existing power structures, finding younger versions of typical trustees instead of making the charity sector more representative of the people it is trying to serve.
2. Each board has different capacity and capabilities in how it can support young trustees. The team at Oxford Hub has often had to deliver a lot of extra support to boards struggling to grapple with inclusion and diversity issues, as well as to participants who may need one-on-one support when finding themselves in a challenging placement.
3. Peer support has been essential to this process. Being a trustee can be challenging at the best of times, especially as this is a voluntary position participants are taking on in their free time. Through bringing the participants together we have been able to allow them to learn from each other, ask for support in a confidential and structured framework and find out about the experiences of other trustees going through the same process.

We have brought together all our learning materials, train-the-trainer content and processes, so that the Young Trustee Movement could lead on the roll-out of a similar model beyond Oxfordshire. Our vision is for this to build skills amongst young people so that they can continue to develop their skills and serve as trustees throughout their lives (not just after retirement).

Moving beyond age diversity:

Since we started the Trustee Programme five years ago, a few things have changed in the sector:

• We have noticed that local boards are now more receptive to young people as trustees, we no longer feel we have to make a strong case for this.
• Nationally, there is a better awareness amongst young people about trusteeship, thanks to campaigns such as the Young Trustee Movement.
• The charity sector as a whole in more recent years has come under increasing scrutiny around its ability to meaningfully represent and involve the people it is serving at a governance level.

As a result of these shifts, and our experience so far of running the young trustees programme, we have piloted some changes. This year, we have focused our recruitment to attract people who bring underrepresented voices and experiences to charity boards, approaching this using a broader understanding of diversity. As part of this, we redirected our focus to supporting people with direct, lived or frontline experience to become trustees at charities working in areas related to those experiences.

We realised we couldn’t do this on our own, so teamed up with the Lived Experience Advisory Forum (LEAF) to work together to recruit and support local individuals who were interested in taking part in the programme, with a focus on experiences related to homelessness and mental illness. LEAF is an independent group which is run by and for Experts by Experience to embed their voices into policy planning, commissioning, service change and evaluation in the local homelessness sector. We have been really grateful for their partnership and support on this project so far, as well as to the Blagrave Trust for their continued support for our work!

If you are interested in hearing more about the LEAF x Hub Trustee Programme, and taking part in a future cohort as either a host charity board or potential trustee, then please register your interest here!