Volunteer Trustee to help lead a small waterway restoration charity that wants to grow

What will you be doing?

As a member of our Board, you will share the responsibility for leading and building our organisation, and we will encourage you to bring your skills and develop the specific role you take on.  We will expect you, if you haven’t previously served as a trustee, to read the relevant information published on the Charity Commission website about the duties of a trustee.  We will be pleased to provide coaching as needed to help you understand the special features of leading a charity delivering infrastructure which will, in the future, deliver significant public benefits.  It will be some years before we can point to actual beneficiaries from the restored and connected waterway.  In the meantime, we do, where we can, deliver incidental benefits to the people around us.   We will provide you with a copy of our constitution (which is published on our website) and a copy of the Charity Governance Code for Smaller Charities. If you can bring some or all of the following:

Willingness  to understand and accept your responsibilities and liabilities as a trustee Ability to think creatively and strategically and exercise independent judgement  Willingness to participate actively in discussion and to contribute ideas. Enthusiasm for the delivery of our charitable objective. Commitment to work consistently with the Nolan principles of public life. Creativity and determination to help keep our project moving forward.

We want to hear from you

What are we looking for?

The key skill in this role is writing the words that will inspire support for our mission amongst our membership.   We are looking for someone with a proven track record in at least one of copy-writing or graphic design or photography who can take over the production of our e-newsletter.  This will include gathering the material, preferably by direct attendance at occasional workparties and visiting the sites in northern Wiltshire where we are working.  Ideally you will have upwards of three years of professional experience in one or more of these three career areas. We publish our newsletter on our website after sending it to our members, so the newsletter is a vital part of our presentation to the wider public.  

What difference will you make?

As the trustee responsible for assembling, editing, and distributing our newsletter (mostly digitally but we do send paper copies to a few members) you will provide the route by which we keep our membership (which we expect to grow) informed of what we are doing and what we are aiming to do. A lively and interesting magazine is a great part of attracting people from further afield to join our Trust. Our work programme is all within a small geographical area, in northern Wiltshire, but we already attract interest from across England.  For our members based outside our locality, the newsletter is what they see of what Wessex Waterways is doing.  What they see is what persuades them to renew their membership subscription each year - and to make other contributions of money, ideas, expertise towards what we are doing to bring certain sections of the Wilts & Berks Canal back into condition for use for boating.  We also maintain sections of the historic towpath - delivering options for local people to enjoy walking in the countryside, with or without their dogs.