The Joys of Being a Trustee

First and foremost is the realisation that people trust you enough to let you loose on the governance of an organisation with gazillions of spondulicks to give out to the deserving population - your name liveth for evermore!

Then you realise that the organisation wasn’t quite as wealthy as you had thought but your friends and colleagues admire your bravery in keeping the ship afloat - you can hold your head high (you’ll probably drown if you don’t).

Perhaps after a career spent looking at bizarre charts on computer screens and convincing yourself that fractal geometry has some relevance to determining stock market movements, you can, as a trustee, do something useful for society at large and, what’s more important, know that you are making an impact. For once in your life you can actually see the direct result of your actions and know that you have made a significant contribution, not just made an infinitesimal change to a bottom line expressed in numbers millions of times larger than your mortgage.

You might also come across people who don’t talk proper, don’t shave and don’t wear lace-up shoes: you do, of course. Then you discover that they have a first class honours degree in nuclear physics (and a doctorate to boot) so does it really matter that they wear trainers?

You will come across so many other people from so many other different walks of life that you begin to wonder just how broad your horizons were in the past; true, the view from the business class window once you have adjusted your flatbed shows a limitless horizon, but that’s not quite the same thing and you can’t see anything much anyway.

People begin to respect you for your obvious abilities and common sense; that respect is worth something because it’s founded on substance, not because you happen to have a swanky title and a slightly larger gas-guzzler than the poor sod who has to obey you.

With some shock you recognise that you don’t know everything after all; but to compensate, more and more of your hidden talents begin to emerge and you begin to learn again.

You learn how to do things, how to work with different people, how to make new friends, how to develop your own self-confidence.

You learn how to live.

How do I know all this? I used to work in banking (when it was a respectable profession) and then financial training, teaching bankers how to run banks (if only they’d listened) but then found the work too tedious for words. I became involved as a volunteer with a local charity over twenty years ago and then found that the voluntary world just grew like Topsy - and there is an unending range of activities in which to get involved.

Go for it!