Swarthmore Care Home
Trustee with a strategic HR focus - Volunteer
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Bring Your HR Knowledge to a Care Home Charity in Gerrards Cross
Can you bring your HR knowledge and skills to an independent Care Home charity based in Gerrards Cross, to help us manage our people teams, as we increase our support for people living with dementia?
What Difference Will You Make?
What Do YOU Get as a Volunteer Trustee with Our Organisation?
- An opportunity to exercise your strategic HR skills, probably in a different environment or context
- An opportunity to influence and collectively-lead our organisation
- A chance to expand and implement your understanding of our work
- A chance to augment your experience of charities
- A boost to your career and CV, if needed
- Satisfaction of helping an organisation that supports older people, thus giving something back to the community
What Do We Get?
- Your strategic skills, knowledge, understanding, and experience, especially in HR and people management
- Your abilities to influence plans for our charity’s future
- Enhancement to our overall governance and the Board of trustees; improvement in our charity and operational growth
- Your participation in our collective decision-making, contributing to all areas of our charity work
- Your enthusiasm
What Do Our Beneficiaries Get?
- The ability to continue and expand support for our residents
- A forward-looking and agile organisation, with a well-informed and well-managed Board of trustees
What Are We Looking For?
Here is some of what we would expect from our trustees; we appreciate you may want to develop more in some of these areas. We know that you may also need training and support from employees, from other trustees, and from external organisations, and that that will be forthcoming, as necessary, to build on any area.
- Understanding of the needs of our residents and their families is desirable; an empathy with them is essential
- Clear commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion, valuing differences to make better decisions and deliver better services for our residents
- Understanding of good HR practice in recruiting, supporting, and retaining employees is essential
- Experience of the use, and understanding, of HR/employment legislation is important, together with its implementation
- Experience of performance management would be welcome, but is not a prerequisite
- Some understanding of good practice in recruiting, supporting, and retaining volunteers would be welcome
- Strategic vision; good, independent judgement; ability to think creatively, tempered by pragmatism and reality
- Ability to cooperatively work with the team of trustees, bringing impartiality and objectivity to decision-making
- Skills and ability to listen, even to dissenting views
- Willingness to speak your mind and to challenge other trustees and employees with good intent; able to make unpopular recommendations to the Board, if necessary
- Skills to analyse proposals, examine their strategic consequences, and make concise recommendations
- Secure personal access to digital communication and able to competently use those resources
- Commitment to the organisation; willingness and ability to devote the necessary time & effort
- While experience and understanding of charity law and governance can be useful, we strongly welcome people without prior charity trustee experience in order to increase the diversity of our Board; training in those areas can be provided
- Willingness to be available to employees for advice and enquiries; ability to visit the Home on an occasional scheduled basis
- Having appropriate personal and professional contacts & networks, with willingness to draw on those as needed
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What Will You Be Doing?
Swarthmore Care Home is an ‘exempt’ (not needing to Register with the Charity Commission) charity 12831R, registered with the FCA, and regulated by the CQC, providing residential and dementia care in a bespoke setting and grounds.
Set up in 1945 with a Quaker ethos, although now neither residents nor trustees are expected to be Quakers, we are looking to increase our Board’s knowledge and abilities for the good care of older people, both now and for the future. Trustees have committed to expanding our facility to better support and care for people living with dementia, and we thus need to increase our collective skill in our people management.
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The Role and What We Are Looking For in a New Trustee
Trustees are the people who make the top-level decisions for our charity. Our Board includes people with governance and financial backgrounds, plus some with understanding of dementia and residential care. We expect new trustees to have empathy with our cause and with our residents.
Our Registered Manager and SLT manages the 50+ employees, and while we utilise outsourced HR/legal advice to ensure compliance, the Board wants a more-robust future-facing people strategy. This trustee role will not be managing the employee team, as trustees do not execute any operational responsibility.
You don’t need prior charity trustee experience, just the ability to jointly contribute to creating and scrutinising strategy. Regular contact and liaison with other trustees, plus at least two scheduled in-person visits to the home per year, is expected.
We are a charity, not a business, but we apply business principles to governing our organisation. We want to expand the diversity of our board, in all meanings of the word, and strongly welcome applications from people from less-represented groups.
We ask for approx. ten hours per month, which includes all meetings, discussions, etc. You will need access to digital communications, as much of our charity’s business is run that way.
The Board meets quarterly (including the AGM), alternating online video meetings with face-to-face, the latter usually held in Gerrards Cross or Beaconsfield. There is no standing HR Subcommittee, and all trustees are invited to join one of the Subcommittees, for Finance, Care, or Strategy.
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