The Young Trustees Movement is looking to appoint five new Trustees to our Board. If you’re aligned to our mission and values, we’d love to hear from you.
The Young Trustees Movement (YTM) is made up of current and aspiring young trustees, employers and allies. We exist to transform charity boards by growing and centring youth leadership, through disruption and collaboration across the sector.
This is a key moment for us and our sector. The need for our work has never been clearer and we are at an exciting time in our development.
The need
We believe passionately in the value of young trusteeship. Young trustees bring new perspectives, new energy, new ideas and new networks to Boards; recruiting new people who ask questions about the way things are done leads boards to challenge long-established approaches which do not necessarily reflect contemporary best practice and to focus on representation and inclusion – not just of young people but also other under-represented groups and people with lived experience of the issues charities address. Bringing young people onto Boards also helps succession planning at a time when Charity Commission data suggests that the median age of a trustee is between 65 and 69, an increase from 60-62 in 2017.
But there is a problem – the same data which shows a vast over-representation of older people on charity Boards also shows a huge under-representation of young people, with just 1% of charity trustees aged under 30. The need for our work, with young trustees and those who aspire to be trustees, as well as with the charities which would like to have greater youth representation on their Boards, is very clear.
An exciting time for our movement
While the need is clear, so is our response. Over recent months, alongside our continued work with young people and Boards, we have been focusing on strengthening our foundations: we have registered as a Community Interest Company and applied to convert into a Charitable Incorporated Organisation.
Thanks to the stability provided by donations from a number of trusts and foundations, we are reviewing our strategy, updating existing programmes and developing new offers.
We have lots of data which shows how much our participants value our programmes – for example, 98% of participants on our flagship Board Boost programme said it increased their confidence and 90% said they would recommend it to others – but we want to do more to measure and demonstrate our impact with young people and charities.
At the same time, we are strengthening our own organisational foundations, putting in place new finance, HR and data protection processes, enabling us to transition from being fiscally hosted to being a fully independent organisation.
All these steps have the same aim: to ensure that we are having the biggest impact possible and that our work continues for the long-term.
To learn more about the role and how to apply, please download the role description. If you have any questions or would like to speak to someone before applying, you can contact us at [email protected].
