The Young Trustees Movement are excited to share that the leadership of the movement is evolving.

We have embraced a co-leadership model for our CEOs, Mita Desai and Claire Hill-Dixon. We want to share why we’ve made this change and what this means for the movement.

As a movement, we’re interested in exploring where power is held and where we can disrupt the status quo. We do this every day within our mission to increase the number of young trustees and transform the landscape of 21st-century governance. We do this because when less than 3% of trustees are under the age of 30, what is normal is not okay.

We saw an opportunity to experiment, to lean into our values, specifically of collaboration and intersectional diversity of perspective. Our intention here is not simply to redistribute responsibility but to develop a practice of showing up that offers an alternative pathway to patriarchal forms of leadership. We intend to use feminist co-leadership models as our guide.

We also know that we work in systems that are not conducive to our intentions of flourishing. Systems that will pull us towards competition instead of collaboration and abundance. We will make mistakes, and we know we will not always be able to make decisions solely aligned with these feminist intentions.

We started to adopt this co-leadership model in March, with Mita’s return from maternity leave. We are in the early stages of forming our ways of working that aim to support ourselves, the wider team and the movement.

We see this opportunity as a ‘learning lab’ for the rest of the sector and commit to sharing reflections and learnings along the way, where we find joy and where we find ourselves up against internal and external resistance.

We’re interested in carving out the space for care and joy in our work. That’s the point, isn’t it? We’re interested in embedding this into our systems, our values and the way we work with others.

The feminist co-leadership practice offers us an opportunity to create a ‘shared duty of care’, that supports us as individuals as well as as a collective. Mita and I have already found joy and mutual care in naming what we struggle with, where we find our power and how we can better navigate these.

‘Self-care is often a burden on the person. As leaders, we must intervene where we can/when we can so that we resist the urgency culture and the systems that cause harm’ Tatu Hey

Here’s our manifesto which is our starting point. Let’s see where the ripples take us. Big thanks to Feminist Co-Leadership for providing the tools to create this manifesto.