My main motivation, initially, for getting involved in charities, was that I had recently moved to Edinburgh and didn’t know anyone in the City aside from my new work colleagues. I joined a charity as a volunteer and after finding out they were looking for a new treasurer, decided to join their board of trustees.

I hadn’t volunteered as a trustee before, but I had always been involved in students’ union work whilst at university, it seemed like a natural progression to go sit on a board after graduating. No one paid me to say this, but, going on EVOC’s training for charity trustees was hugely beneficial – I admit I was pretty clueless about charity rules and regulations, I had jumped into the role a bit head first!

New Responsibilities

Thankfully, I had supportive fellow board members beside me to help me learn about my new role and as I was working in a junior position at work, I enjoyed the new responsibilities that the role gave me. Working with the charity gave me invaluable experience; from grant writing, to writing business plans and understanding HR. I’m not going to lie and say it was plain sailing, it was an incredible learning curve, especially when I became co-chair with a fellow trustee.

Volunteering as a trustee gave me experience and examples of much higher level work than my paid job did, which helped me greatly when looking for new jobs and progressing my career. It also broadened my horizons outwith my career in admin. It gave me greater work-place resilience, made me realise my own capabilities and helped improve my own self-confidence. I volunteered with the charity for over two years as a trustee, and it was a difficult decision to step down when I did. I’ve since been volunteering in non-trustee roles, but I am currently looking into joining another board in the near future.

Isn’t it great when things really are learnt from good practice? 

When my colleague Katherine, David (from the Cooncil) and I set off on our 6 hour round train trip on a Friday morning to North Ayrshire I wasn’t absolutely convinced it was great use of more than one third of my working week hours – I could feel the emails stacking up in the inbox in the office.  It was a grey, bleak day and David had finished his lunchtime butties before we had even reached Haymarket… (you know the kind of trip).  We had heard that North Ayrshire Council had managed to get brilliant engagement with young people when they ran a participatory budgeting for youth work in the area. Over 50% of young people in North Ayrshire had voted, which translated into around 5000 participants between the ages of 12 – 25.  That is pretty impressive stuff, and we wanted to find out more.

Donna, the ‘one woman turbo engagement machine’ from North Ayrshire Council was responsible for running the show, was also impressive, but in her own words ‘not always popular’, when she added to the workload of the schools in the area.  Events were run in each locality and young people voted in schools, youth centres/clubs, residential units, job centres, homeless hostels etc.   In schools the voting was built into the school timetable – so they weren’t just relying on lunchtime activity.  Donna saw no barriers to participation that couldn’t be crashed through with a little effort and understanding, they hadn’t got it all right straight away but every year they were getting better.  Social media was used extensively to promote the voting, and a promotional video created for each project by the Council, so that each project could be promoted consistently, rather than expect projects to market themselves which can have varying outcomes depending on skill. 

The youth PB project was promoted as not just being about voting but active citizenship, community cohesion/participation.  As my 11-year-old is coming home with tales of how she is learning about parliament and voting, and how it’s all a bit dull, I try to instill in her how exciting it can be if you keep it real and believe that people can have a say. By being able to play her part in democracy rather than just hearing the theory might just make the difference to how engaged she is in the future. 

What have we learnt?  Well since that trip the Council have made some changes to their plans for the voting in the Participatory Budgeting Choose Youth Work 2018-2019 Grants programme.  This year Andy Gray, Head of Schools and Lifelong Learning, has written to all Edinburgh’s secondary head teachers asking them to nominate a teacher or member of staff with whom the steering group for Choose Youth Work 2019-19 can liaise directly and organise the voting.  

Perhaps taking the time out of our day to visit North Ayrshire PB made the difference, perhaps a bit like PB we needed the time to prepare and reflect for us to really take on the information, to make something happen and to make an impact.

With any luck we will see a real difference to the level of engagement with young people this year as they vote for the projects that they think sound like what they need.  The truth, of course, is in the participation in the voting…and we won’t hear back about that until the votes are cast in March.  Watch this space.       Read more here

This tongue twister of a workshop title comes from a Governance Institute paper called “Cultural Markers: Assessing, measuring and Improving Culture in the Charitable Sector”. I think it really captures the essence of good governance and why it’s so important and this was the focus of this workshop at our Conference.

We had a discussion about what good governance is, how it’s achieved, and some of the reasons it can be so difficult. Some of the fundamentals of a well-run board that workshop attendees identified were: trustees who understand their role, transparency, trustees who share the values of the organisation, good policies and structures – and ensuring they’re followed, inclusion, and a culture of healthy debate. Whilst these points are the ideal, we also identified some of the challenges to achieving these such as:

• trustees who lack time or commitment;
• trustees who don’t understand the role;
• disinterest or lack of understanding of the finances of the organisation;
• poor organisation – board papers not going out on time;
• not having a good understanding of the risks to the organisation or how to mitigate them;
• and the constitution not being referred to, understood, or being out of date.

Some of these can seem fairly minor, but in fact, they can create significant weak points in the organisation that can have serious implications.

We also discussed the importance of the relationship between the board and the senior management of organisations. Everyone had different ways of ensuring that relationship worked well – for some it meant having occasional board meetings where senior management don’t attend, for others they have a trustee only meeting for the first 30 minutes and senior management join after that. It highlighted the fact that very often there are not hard and fast rules for organisations to achieve the ideals of good governance – it’s up to the trustees to figure out what works best and to have the flexibility for that to change over time.

The workshop attendees were people from organisations just starting out and people who have been on boards or worked for charities for a long time, very small entirely volunteer-run organisations and larger ones. With such a diverse range of experience in the room, it was a good opportunity to have discussions about common issues and practical solutions that we found have helped in real life situations. As a bonus, our icebreaker was to name a favourite film so I’m hoping everyone came away with some good movie suggestions for the weekend!   

If you have specific queries you would like answered, then you can contact our Organisational Development team by filling in a referral form. 

At our Conference, Scottish Government presented an overview of the current landscape in terms of the devolution of £2.8bn of benefits from UK to Scottish Government, the new agency which will be established and the Experience Panels which have been set up to allow those with lived experience of the current benefit system to inform this process.

There was a discussion covering the following issues:

• Organisations are experiencing an increase in both the level of support needed and the number of people needing support.
• The risk of sanction when participating in volunteering and other opportunities which improve wellbeing.
• The benefit of welfare rights advice and advocacy services.
• Fundamental issues with the assessment process whereby such a short process can often be used to make knee-jerk judgements.
• The basis for targets which are seen to work against people’s best interests – for example, the DWP’s target to refuse 80% of mandatory reconsiderations (especially considering that in Edinburgh 75-80% of appeals are successful.
• The need for the new agency to try to address stigma and the culture which has been established around the receipt of benefits.
• How to help seldom heard communities have a meaningful voice in terms of influencing the new system in Scotland.

We agreed to remain actively in discussion as the new agency forms and follow up on specific opportunities to engage seldom heard communities.

In light of the forthcoming review of the Health and Social Care grants programme, we facilitated a workshop at our Conference to investigate the merits of a third sector lead Commission on Prevention.  The busy workshop explored issues and voiced opinions on what exactly we mean by ‘prevention’ and how might the third sector effectively lead on promoting the agenda through such a commission:

• Objective: to demonstrate what prevention would look like in Edinburgh, and to encourage collaborative work to move resources to recognisable preventive measures
• Strategy: to listen and gather evidence from individuals on what preventative measures would help them in their particular circumstance, (circa 500 Edinburgh citizens)
• Considering: Existing preventative spend – is it working and enough?

We asked what role grants play in promoting prevention and what do we know works well.

The results of the workshop are being written-up into a short report that will then be considered by Third Sector Strategy Group (TSSG) and inform the development of the Commission.