Assured Unitary Governance Model

The current governance model for large, complex charities is broken and unfit for the current regulatory environment in which volunteer trustees find themselves. In this article Philip Kirkpatrick outlines his alternative vision.

Whenever anything goes wrong in a charity in a way that reaches the public ear, people freely express their views about what the trustees did or did not do that led to this particular sorry state of affairs. Too little credit is given to the trustees who actually faced those circumstances and too few of us ever ask what we would have done in their shoes.

It reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt's famous 'man in the arena' speech, which begins: 'It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up