Charities should ensure that trustees don’t just bring professional skills or useful contacts but that they share the values of the organisation, otherwise there will be problem, a charity founder said earlier this week.
Ruth Ibegbuna, who founded youth charity Reclaim, was giving the closing plenary at NCVO’s annual conference on Monday, when she advised people setting up charities to ensure that their values run all the way through their organisation.
She said that charities should think about “who we demand values of”.
“I realised that for my youth workers coming in I would grill them, I would want to make sure that everything Reclaim believed they had it all the way through them,” she said.
But she said that the bar was not so high for people coming in at a higher level.
“I implore with people who are starting small charities to 'make sure you're applying the same test to your trustees that you apply to every other member of staff',” she said, because “that golden thread should run through”.
Ibegbuna suggested that the reason charities had different standards was because they wanted to attract people with professional skills or connections who could help with fundraising.
“Whether you've got an accountant, a lawyer or a lord lieutenant or whoever it is sat round your trustee board,” she said, “if they haven't got the same values that you espouse in your charity then there is a problem.”
And she said where she has had problems with people not sharing the charity’s values it was usually the more senior people.
She said: “There is something about really looking at the values of everyone who is involved with your charity, because that was something that I learnt quite painfully a few times and it was never the junior youth workers that were problematic.”
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