Trustee - Volunteer in Birmingham

A chance to get into governing our regional specialist charity with a national reach and promote outcomes for our 480 students, community users and supported living clients. The ultimate beneficiaries of your efforts with us will be our students and clients, who need the quality of what we do to be the best now and a strategic future that will share our expertise as widely as is possible and sensible in the longer-term.

Your experience or expertise and time would help us to build a more resilient governing team, making us even more capable of striking the right balance between oversight of what we do now and weighing up future options. If you join us, there'd be the 'here and now' needing governance oversight. But, before long, significant questions will start to need addressing, especially about how best to develop community services and supported living. Your skills would be part of our team's success.

As a charity serving people who have disabilities, we’ll always welcome interest in trusteeship with us from people who have related professional or personal experience. But much of what we do is not rooted in disability. Financial, estate, property development, risk, audit and the art of governance itself are examples. We believe that we’d be a great place for people who don’t have a disability background to be introduced to it via this senior level. There’s room for professionals looking for a trusteeship to mesh with their career ambitions.

Behind sector skills, we’ll only benefit if you have the confidence to project your contributions during meetings, allowing the team to benefit from what you have to offer. All our trustees need to share our core values of respect, inclusion, integrity, collaboration, excellence and enabling and our mission to empower young adults who have disabilities and learning difficulties. You’d need to embrace our safeguarding policies and culture.

We receive about £15m of income from taxpayers annually, meaning that our trustees hold public office. Everyone in our governing team is required to abide by the Seven Principles of Public Life that relate to selflessness; integrity; objectivity; accountability; openness; honesty; and leadership.

We need our trustees to challenge us, as well as to recognise what’s good; we’re after contributors rather than observers who have the time needed for the full breadth of the role. At QAC, that means attending board meetings on-site and committee meetings virtually; you’ll be on at least one of them (audit, governance, quality, remuneration or resources) and there’s also a chance to be a director on our trading subsidiary that makes profits to give to us. A schedule of governance meetings is available but, this year, all meetings start at 2pm and are planned for three hours, including breaks. You’ll also attend our annual strategy day and take part in appraisal of your performance.

You must share our commitment to safeguarding by undertaking relevant training, including refreshers, or seeking exemption for comparable training elsewhere. As a trustee, you would also fulfil what we regard as the important role of lead (link) trustee, making three visits annually to test what you experience 'on the ground' against what managers are telling you. We appreciate that people’s availability to give even more time than this minimum varies but, across the year, we do expect our Board of Trustees as a whole to attain a reasonable degree of on-site contact with us through our Continuing Engagement Opportunities for Governance.

You would play a part in this. Your focus will be on whether the quality of what we do is meeting expectations across our services, but you don’t need to be an expert in all of these and, where you’re not, we think this is a great way to broaden your experience, including getting into disabled services if that’s new to you. We’re a friendly, if rigorous, bunch.

You’d be joining us just as our ambitious expansion programme is getting underway with construction of a new therapies suite, to be followed by a 10-year plan to increase our specialist further education college from 480 to 700 places; one of our most significant problems is keeping up with demand. The same is true of our community services and supported living. Trustees spent their most recent strategy day deciding to expand these, too, making this an ideal time for your strategic thinking.

You’d be supported with induction and ongoing training opportunities and you would be able to call on our Director of Governance for support. QAC’s main site is in the heart of the Harborne residential, close to its vibrant High Street with a vet, GP surgery and leisure centre/pool in between. All this is on the direct 24 bus service from outside our front gate to a Birmingham New Street entrance; 20 minutes outside rush hour.