Training for Trustees and Governors
Your trustees and governors set the standards for your organisation. Make sure they have the tools and training to deliver.
Trustees and governors are volunteers. You’ll have a team of engaged people, keen to make an impact, with a diverse set of skills and experiences. This should mean that you can achieve great things as a team. It can also stifle you if you don’t manage it well.
Trustee Training courses are specifically designed to help you address the difficulty you face in balancing the strategic scrutiny you are responsible for, while not being there to deliver the operational side of things. For some trustees this can feel like an overwhelming challenge. How do you know that the strategic vision is being implemented? How can you effect change quickly enough if you are not allowed to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in?
If you have trustees and governors who read the guidance on how to be effective trustees, and what skills you need to be a governor, you might find motivation is quickly deflated as the task becomes overwhelming. It’s likely to be the largest, most comprehensive job description you’ll ever wade through, and it’s for a voluntary role based on a few hours a month.
So how do you manage the range of skills, the huge task, the necessary distance and the impact? Trustee Training offers a range of half and full-day courses to help your trustees and governors get up to speed quickly and operate with confidence.
Run by an experienced charity trustee, executive and chair of a school governing body, the courses combine best practice examples from a range of sectors with real-world experience.
I have over 15 years experience in the charity and arts sectors, and over 8 years experience in governance. I saw the same difficulties manifest themselves over and over again with each team I worked with. I saw charities struggle with mission drift, staff engaging with activity that was never scrutinised for success, and senior leadership teams develop the vision based on instinct rather than evidence. I saw charities struggling to stay afloat because of problems with fundraising. I saw staff pore over evaluation reports panicking about how to report their impact to funders. And I saw organisations struggling repeatedly to tell the story of why they exist, what difference they are making and why this matters.
I worked with organisations where staff are so busy delivering day to day work that they cannot see how to develop or grow. I advised boards of trustees who mean well but struggle to apply their knowledge and skills in the time-frame available. I saw new trustees try to hit the ground running with little induction and some without the understanding of how a strategic overview rather than an operational view works in practice.
Trustee Training is the sister company of impact consultancy, The Pebble. I work with organisations to review their impact. I support organisations to make organisational change that allows them to have a bigger impact. I work with companies and individuals to develop their strategy; to make their work on strategies meaningful and useful, instead of asking staff members to spend days on a document that sits in a drawer . I help with fundraising and communications by working with organisations to tell the story of why they exist and what they change. Trustee Training focuses specifically on the small teams of volunteers who are responsible for the strategic oversight of a charity or school, but who are not involved in operational running.
I have worked on both sides of the third sector; governance and delivery. On the delivery side I have managed projects, departments and charities. I have definitely groaned when trustees have had a too limited view of what’s possible and fought to make trustee teams I’ve worked for to be bolder and braver. I have also struggled with trustees having unrealistic expectations of the staff on the ground whilst being unwilling to invest in the vision or provide adequate resources.
On the governance side, I have over 8 years experience as a trustee and governor. My first experience as a trustee was with Manchester DEP, which was an educational charity that focused on global issues. I was a founding trustee with RECLAIM, a youth leadership and social change organisation. I was part of the board of trustees as the charity moved through a period of growth and change.
I am currently the Chair of Governors at Alma Park Primary School, a large maintained primary school in Manchester.
I am a parent governor representative on Manchester City Council’s Children and Young People’s Scrutiny Committee and the Ofsted subcommittee of this group.
I have worked with an extensive range of organisations to successfully improve strategy, impact and governance.
*Blows trumpet*
“Monika is a dedicated, enthusiastic and passionate person with the strength to influence at any level.”
“Monika is an excellent communicator. She is creative, efficient, reliable and fun.”
“I’ve had really positive feedback from all sectors of the team, who have reflected that they were able to use the strategies and examples to relate to their own experience in many ways. This makes for a level of depth in the training experience that goes beyond what we could have hoped for.”
“Monika often finds innovative solutions to challenges and suggests refreshing perspectives.”
“You’ve totally changed my problem-solving and problem-finding’ thought processes. Thank you.”
“The session was engaging, challenging and inventive.”
“Great pace in the sessions and helpful to show us multiple approaches to tackle our practices.”
“Monika demonstrated a great understanding of what’s needed when pulling diverse teams together, coordinating engaging workshop activities and developing a fantastic toolkit which the team were then able to roll out in future activity.”
“Super presentation, and I feel more motivated [as trustee of the charity] than ever down to you.”