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Independent Online Edition > Gap Year: "Geraldine Peacock: Charities need more diverse trustee boards
By the Chair of the Charity Commission
Published: 17 November 2005

The year of the Volunteer is drawing to its close and all the evidence is that it's been a real success - tapping into a mood and a need in society to give something back. The Commission seized on this opportunity to make a push to encourage people to become charity trustees - the people who govern the 190,000 charities in England and Wales.

We've teamed up with volunteer charity TimeBank for Get on Board, a campaign to encourage people to come forward as trustees. We're also dispelling a few myths about trusteeship. You don't have to be retired, middle-aged and middle class to contribute to a charity you care about. And you don't have to wait to be asked.

Trustees have a wide remit. It's their job to make sure their charity stays solvent and does the things it was set up to do. They also make sure charities meet their legal obligations - such as the timely submission of accounts and annual returns to the Charity Commission. The role can be hard and is usually unpaid - but the personal rewards can be huge.

We want people on trustee boards to be as diverse as the charities they represent. Currently, half of all trustees are over 40 years old and relatively few come from ethnic minorities. We want to broaden this to include younger people from a range of backgrounds.

Because if young people don't step forward now, who will govern the charities of the future? The early results from Get on Board give me confidence we're on the right track. In less than three months over 1,600 people have registered with the campaign. Around threequarters of these are under the age of 45, compared with just one-quarter of currently serving trustees and a quarter of those who signed up are people from minority ethnic backgrounds.

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