You can read the blog written ahead of the consultations by our wonderful Ambassador & Transition Board Member Kate, explaining why we began this process here.

On average we receive 50-75 requests to share vacancies per month, and we want to ensure that opportunities are being seen by all the amazing aspiring young trustees in our community!

After many conversations with young people, charities of all sizes, the movement, and our transition board, we have come to some decisions! Here’s what we’re doing…

The consultation looked into 2 key areas:

• How we ensure the opportunities we post are appropriate and inclusive
• Whether we should introduce a fee for our services

We are a values led organisation and it’s  important that the opportunities we promote reflect our values. Currently we only advertise opportunities where reasonable expenses are covered for trustees, and encourage the organisations that advertise with us to both attend our free champion training and offer training to the trustee(s) they recruit.

We have added a statement for the recruiting organisations to express their commitment to inclusive working. However, from our discussions it became clear that:

• This could be tokenisitc. It is easy to tick a box but not act in inclusive ways.

• Inclusion is a process, not a binary. We don’t wish to discourage organisations who are meaningfully and actively improving their ways of working.

  • We also recognise that different people will have different understandings of inclusion, and there is no such thing as ‘fully accessible’. What is inclusive to one person could be exclusionary to another.

• We would be unable to monitor if organisations are working inclusively.

From our consultations, we introduced the following changes that counter some of the challenges listed above:

• Continue to only advertise posts that cover reasonable expenses
• Still introduce a new statement that explains the importance of inclusion of young and marginalised people. Because we can’t enforce inclusive practices, we will ask charities to express a commitment to inclusivity. This has been included at the start of the form that charities use to submit trustee vacancies.
• Created a checklist of questions for aspiring young trustees to consider when researching trusteeship opportunities to empower them to make their own informed decisions. This free resource can be found here.
• Increase signposting for organisations to our champion training and good recruitment checklist.
• In the future we aim to create a mechanism for young people to feed back their experiences.

We have decided to introduce a sliding scale fee structure to advertise and promote vacancies. We understand that this may be a deterrent to some organisations as we have previously offered our services for free, at a cost to Young Trustees Movement. As outlined in our original blog this is important for our sustainability, and will hopefully enable us to offer a more robust and impactful service to those organisations that work with us to recruit young trustees. It is not unusual for recruiters to charge, and we are endeavouring to keep fees affordable.

We will also be offering free posting to small organisations, and bursaries to organisations that might find the costs inhibitive for other reasons. We will regularly review this process.

Proposed Fees:

• Small charitable organisations (less than £100,000 yearly income) - FREE
• Small-medium charitable organisations (between £100,000 and £500,000 yearly income) - £50
• Medium-large charitable organisations (between £500,000 and £1,000,000 yearly income) - £100
• Large charitable organisations (over £1,000,000 yearly income) and recruitment agencies - £150

If these fees are inhibitive for your organisation for any reason, we are happy to discuss this with you via hello@youngtrusteesmovement.org. We never want organisations to be unfairly priced out. Young people will never be charged for viewing or applying to our listings.

How will fees impact the support you receive?

By creating a sustainable financial approach to this work, our long term hope is that we will be able to increase the different layers of advertising and recruitment support we can offer.

In the short term, everyone who posts with us will be promoted on our X and LinkedIn irrespective of what they can afford.

In the longer term, we hope to increase our offer, with varied levels of support and promotion. The specifics will depend on the impact of the new changes and our capacity, but may include actions such as regular targeted newsletters to all young people who have signed up to learn about opportunities, or hosting spaces for aspiring young trustees to network with organisations who are recruiting trustees.

We want to reassure the Movement that those who can’t afford to pay won’t miss out.

We would like to thank the movement for being so generous with your feedback and ideas throughout the consultation process.

We look forward to introducing a more robust and sustainable model that offers increased promotion for organisations, whilst ensuring that young people can make informed decisions about applying to inclusive boards.

Key links:

• Post opportunities here on our 'Get Involved' page (see 'Advertise An Opportunity')
• Browse current trustee vacancies here
• Sign up to be notified of future opportunities here on our 'Get Involved' page (see 'Search Trustee Vacancies' -> 'Sign up for future opportunities')