What do trustees do?

The trustees are the people with final responsibility for legal governance and oversight of the charity. While our staff team runs the organisation day to day, the trustees set the policies by which the staff team must work, and the overall direction of the organisation. They scrutinise our accounts, observe our programmes, and ultimately decide things like:

What Pathfinders does
Who Pathfinders is for
How Pathfinders manages its money and projects

What are we looking for in a trustee?

Pathfinders looks for lots of different things in our trustees. We’re always keen on finding people with muscle-weakening conditions with expertise in areas like finance, HR, and grants and funding.

However, we’re also looking for trustees to represent people with specific conditions – including spaces for:

A second SMA representative
A second DMD representative
A Congenital Muscular Dystrophy representative
A Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy representative
A Motor Neurone Disease representative
Two rare and unspecified muscle-weakening condition representatives

The condition-specific representatives join us in our work exploring treatment, resources, and support for people with muscle-weakening conditions, working internally and with external partners to ensure that we’re meeting the needs of people from specific communities

What we’re looking for in trustees is enthusiasm for the work Pathfinders is doing, people being able to commit to involvement over an extended period of time, and a desire to be part of setting the direction of the organisation.

How much will I have to do?

Our Trustee Board meets 4 times a year, and has active engagement by email and WhatsApp in between meetings. We also have a Management Committee of 4 trustees (our co-chairs plus two open spaces), who meet with our CEO and Deputy CEO monthly, and are more involved in the active management of the charity on a day to day basis.

Why should I become a trustee?

There are lots of benefits of being a Trustee. In terms of your own career and professional development, you would be taking on a leadership and strategic oversight role. You would be developing your own skills, expertise and experience while working as part of a team. You would also be able to network within the Pathfinders ecosystem, and set the future direction for the Charity.