Led by Fiona Ash from CASS Business School, Centre for Charity Effectiveness.
On Saturday 2nd February, the Lloyd Park Children’s Charity ran an ‘away day’ on Leadership and Governance for board members, trustees and senior leadership team. It was set up to help us understand our roles better and help us work together to govern and lead the charity successfully. And you know what? It was great! We all came out of it feeling totally fired up and inspired to take the charity forward together.
I’ve been a Trustee of the Lloyd Park Children’s Charity for over a year now. Whilst I’ve enjoyed it and found it very interesting, if I’m honest I’ve often been uncharacteristically quiet at meetings because I’ve been unsure exactly what being a trustee means and how I can enhance outcomes for families and children who use our services. So this training was particularly useful for me.
The day started with a ‘getting to know you’ exercise where we shared our simple pleasures. It was a great way to get to know each other. And it quickly revealed what we all have in common – finding pleasure in finally finding 5 minutes of peace to ourselves!
Suitably warmed up, we got to business. The first activity of the day was to look back over the last year and to start to look forward to 2019 and beyond. In groups, we were asked to identify things that have happened over the past year that we are proud of, things that we have been surprised by and things that we are looking forward to working on in the next year. The results were fantastic and really got the room buzzing. It is obvious that we have so much to be proud of and so much to look forward to. Our instruc
tor described having carried out this excessive many times before and often finding it fall flat, but not at LPCC!
Next, we were given a brief presentation about the role of the trustee and an introduction to charity governance. Specifically the presentation focused on the six main duties of trustees and the Charity Governance Code written in 2017.
After a tea break, it was over to us again. This time we were asked to think about the boundaries between senior staff and board members/ trustees. We looked at a model structure, and discussed how tasks would be shared in an ideal world. We talked about how this compares to the way things work at LPCC and whether we need to change that balance at all. This exercise really helped us to clarify how we can best work together and challenge each other in order to take forward the core principles of the charity.
Finally, we moved on to thinking about new trustees and how we can improve their induction when they join the board. We all agreed that this is an area that would benefit from improvements and between us we came up with a very long list of activities that should take place before people join the board, upon joining, six months after joining and 1 year after joining. Amongst all of the other ideas, we all agreed that an away day like this should be part of the induction of all new trustees and members of the board.
When the final exercise was finished, the morning was topped off by an excellent lunch provided by the Community Cafe from Higham Hill Park and another chance to get to know each other a little better.
All of the thoughts, ideas and suggestions that came up during the day are going to be written up and will inform the governance and leadership of LPCC going forward. But even more importantly, after getting together like this we all feel a little bit closer to each other, even more inspired to take the charity forward and even more certain of what we can achieve together. Not a bad outcome for a cold Saturday morning in February!”
Sarah Parson (Trustee)
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