Most smaller charities and groups are grateful that anyone is willing to volunteer to become a Trustee or Committee Member in the first place. So often making more enquiries into what that individual can offer or bring to the organisation (or how the organisation can support that potential trustee) is overlooked.<\/p>\n
But it should be good practice to \u2018interview\u2019 or understand that new trustee a bit better. After all, you\u2019re all then better informed as to how that individual will work with you in the months and years ahead.<\/p>\n
So with that in mind, here\u2019s a number of open, perhaps challenging questions that you could ask of your prospective board members. Ask them informally or even very formally as part of an interview process. But ask, listen and learn.<\/p>\n
How passionate are you about our organisation\/charity \/ our mission \/ our cause?<\/strong><\/p>\n How much time can you realistically give to us?<\/strong><\/p>\n What motivates you as a volunteer?<\/strong><\/p>\n What expectations do you have from your time on our board \/ or from us as a management team?<\/strong><\/p>\n What are your personal dreams or aspirations that could benefits from being on our board?<\/strong><\/p>\n What professional or personal constraints are there on your time or service that you might anticipate?<\/strong><\/p>\n How important to you is social interaction with the other board members?<\/strong><\/p>\n How do you feel about performance evaluation \u2013 both of yourself and others as individuals or as a board as a whole?<\/strong><\/p>\n Where do your strengths lie? (This question could be structured around roles \u2013 such as Ambassador, Advocate etc or around the 5 S\u2019s of Governance \u2013 Stretch, Strategy, Scrutiny, Stewardship, Support)<\/strong><\/p>\n If you got meaningful answers back to those questions you\u2019ll know a lot more about how that prospective trustee is going to fit in with your board (and also how the board needs to accommodate or work with them).<\/p>\n What do you ask? What questions do you think would work? How does your own induction process tackle this?<\/p>\n Why not come along to our next \u201cTea and Trustees\u201d session and talk this through (this Friday 22nd<\/sup> May, 9.30am-11.30am at Grimsby Minster caf\u00e9 \u2013 just pop along. Date changed from 29th<\/sup> May for May only.)<\/strong><\/p>\n Or, if you\u2019re a Member or Friend of VANEL, why not get yourself a login to our new Governance Forum and join in the discussions about Trusteeship there. (http:\/\/governance.atvanel.org.uk<\/a> \u2013 contact Karl Elliott, karl@vanel.org.uk<\/a> for more information).<\/strong><\/p>\n\n What do you ask new or prospective volunteers joining your board? Here’s our starter set of questions. And by the way, “Tea and Trustees” has moved to this Friday (22nd May) instead of 29th May…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"xn-wppe-expiration":[],"xn-wppe-expiration-action":[],"xn-wppe-expiration-prefix":[],"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[139],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3cThd-2th","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9503"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9505,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9503\/revisions\/9505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}