What did you do during the great lockdown?

Perhaps you’ve learned to play the guitar, speak Spanish or bake the perfect Victoria Sponge? Chances are you’ve had to deal with more mundane but important matters, such as home schooling, helping isolated relatives and neighbours and, of course, trying to address some of the real challenges facing so many organisations at the moment. Lockdown time is certainly not downtime, but it can be an opportunity to take a step back from the busy day to day demands of our BC (before Covid) lives to re-assess how we do what we do and how prepared our organisations are for the future, whatever that holds. Now could be just the time you need to look at your organisation’s governance, structure and policies, or to develop those you need but don’t yet have. Often trustees and professionals alike won’t have looked at their governing document for years, assuming they can even find it! Many charities are set up with legal structures that are outdated and leave their trustees exposed to legal claims and personal liability. Others are not familiar with the precise wording of their charitable Objects, which could unduly limit the scope of what they can do or may give them more freedom than they realise they have. Similarly, policies, where they exist at all, can be out of date or may have been cut and pasted from elsewhere and not fit for a particular charity’s purposes and the kind of work it engages in. Increasingly a host of regulators, as well as funders, look to charities to have the right policies in place to demonstrate legal compliance, best practice and the professionalism expected of them; and so keeping on top of your safeguarding, data protection, equalities, funding and other policies is becoming more important than ever before. Or you may have questions about staff working from home, data protection or furloughing. My work for charities, large and small, encompasses all aspects of governance, regulatory compliance, re-structuring, policy reviews and drafting, trustee and SMT training and fielding questions on a wide range of diverse issues about problems you didn’t even know you had until they became critical! If you have a particular issue you would like to discuss, or even for a general discussion, please don’t hesitate to contact me here for a completely informal chat. Just don’t forget the cake!