The Young Trustees Movement stands for more than just to ‘double the number of trustees aged 30 and under on charity boards’. That mission tagline didn’t account for meaningful experiences on trustee boards. So as a board we thought about if we want this blanket statement to represent us and how do we make a statement that values the experiences and diversity of young trustees? We decided to change this and update our mission tagline.
How did we do that?
The trustees and CEO came together to have a brainstorming session. Before the session, the team were asked to send 5-8 words that they would use to describe YTM. We came up with the following.
Which was then separated into 4 themes:
Theme 1
Bold, Strong, Fearless, Unapologetic, Disruptive, Boundary-pushing, Passionate
Theme 2
Advocating, Empowering, Leading, Visionary, Aspiring, Encouraging, Motivating, Social justice
Theme 3
Strategic, System-Based, Effective governance
Theme 4
Inclusion, Intergenerational, Future-proofing, Evolving, Community, Embracing
The trustees were split into groups to delve deeper and flesh out these words into phrases, they came up really great ideas such as:
- Fearlessly push the boundaries of good governance
- Unleash the passion of young people to disrupt the status quo
- We want people to do more than just think – we want them to act.
- We light/ignite the spark.
From the whole exercise and combining the thoughts from the board, the proposed new mission is:
“Unleashing the power of young people to enable effective governance”
What’s next?
This discussion brought about many more questions which will be helpful in the future to discuss when looking at our vision and fleshing out a large mission statement. Questions like, how do we embrace community and future proofing? Do we exist to support young people? Or do we exist to support boards? (and then more indirectly their beneficiaries).
What standards can we set? What does success look like for us?
We hope to refresh our vision and create a larger mission statement at some point and we will be updating our communications to reflect the new tagline.
This exercise was incredibly helpful in keeping us a team and organisation accountable to our mission. We hope to include more input from our community and ensure everyone feels aligned to our vision and mission as an organisation.
