Volunteer Chair to lead Board of Mental Health Charity

What will you be doing?

Relate West Surrey is looking for a Chair to lead the growth of its relationship and counselling services to adults, couples, families and children. The Chair will build, maintain and engage a diverse set of Board members, ensuring Board business is run effectively following good governance principles. Current board members offer a wide range of professional skills in support of an experienced and highly regarded senior management team.   Relate West Surrey is an independent charity based in Woking, operating within seven local boroughs, and part of the Relate National Federation.  Job title: Chair Commitment: Board meetings are quarterly in the evenings for 3 hours. Subcommittees and topic specific working groups as needed. 2 days a month   Main Responsibilities ●        Chairing and facilitating Board meetings ●        Giving direction to Board policy making ●        Monitoring that decisions taken at meetings are implemented ●        Representing the charity at national and local level and acting as a spokesperson as appropriate ●        Managing, motivating, supporting, challenging CEO through regular interactions ●        Leading the process of appraising the performance of the CEO ●        Sitting on appointment and disciplinary panels ●        Liaising with the CEO to develop the Board of Trustees ●        Engaging with the Vice Chair / Treasurer and other key governance and control leads to provide resilience ●        Bringing impartiality and objectivity to decision-making ●        Facilitating change and addressing conflict within the Board and within the organisation, liaising with the CEO. ●        Ensuring that the mix of Trustee skills is appropriate to support the Charity and its management

What are we looking for?

We are looking for a Chair to lead the growth of our relationship and counselling services to adults, couples, families and children. The Chair will build, maintain and engage a diverse set of Board members, ensuring Board business is run effectively following good governance principles. Current board members offer a wide range of professional skills in support of an experienced and highly regarded senior management team. In common with many small charities, there are also opportunities to be 'hands on' in many cases and have closer involvement than exists in large organisations,

What difference will you make?

As a Chair of the Board you will contribute to the strategic direction of the Charity, ensure effective performance and appropriate financial management, as well as meeting ongoing governance and legal obligations. Your contribution to the successful running of this charity will mean that hundreds of adults and children will receive high quality counselling services (more than 5,000 hours each year) - thus improving their lives forever. Couple relationship breakdown is a common feature of today’s society. It has damaging consequences both for the affected adults and their children. Relate West Surrey performs a front-line role in seeking to prevent this. Our counselling not only helps our immediate clients, it also benefits the wider community in many ways, for example:

Reducing working time lost by stress and mental health issues Discouraging domestic violence Helping to prevent or stop drug and alcohol abuse Preventing or stopping child abuse Improving the attendance and performance of children at school Stopping disruptive and anti-social behaviour Reducing levels of teenage pregnancy

Although traditionally known for adult relationship counselling expertise, more than half our counselling hours are now delivered to young people as part of the NHS CAMHS Mindworks service in Surrey and through our private young persons service, iRelate.