Charity Non-Executive Recruitment

Charity NED & Trustee Recruitment

NED Capital recruits trustees, non-executive directors and board members for charities, foundations, social enterprises and not-for-profit organisations across the UK. Charity governance operates within a regulatory framework — the Charity Commission for England and Wales (CCEW), the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland — that creates specific trustee duties and accountability obligations that differ materially from commercial company governance. Finding trustees with the right combination of charity governance awareness, sector expertise and independent skills to strengthen a charity board requires a recruitment approach that understands those specific requirements. Adrian Lawrence FCA, founder of NED Capital and Fellow of the ICAEW, leads every charity board search personally.

Call 0203 137 2496 or email recruitment@nedcapital.co.uk to discuss a trustee or NED search for your charitable organisation.

The Charity Governance Environment

Charities in England and Wales are regulated by the Charity Commission for England and Wales (CCEW), which registers charities, sets governance expectations and investigates governance failures. Scottish charities are regulated by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR). Charities operating across the UK’s jurisdictions manage relationships with multiple regulators — each with their own registration requirements, annual reporting obligations and governance expectations.

Trustees are the governing body of a charity — legally responsible for the charity’s activities, its financial management and its compliance with charity law and the terms of the governing document. Trustees owe their primary duty to the charity’s beneficiaries and charitable purposes, not to donors, employees or the wider public. The CCEW’s guidance document The Essential Trustee sets out the six duties of charity trustees — acting in the charity’s best interests, managing the charity’s resources responsibly, acting with reasonable care and skill, ensuring the charity is accountable, complying with the charity’s governing document and the law, and acting only in the charity’s interest.

The Charity Governance Code — a voluntary code developed collaboratively by the sector’s governance stakeholders — sets out seven principles for good charity governance: organisational purpose; leadership; integrity; decision-making, risk and control; board effectiveness; equality, diversity and inclusion; and openness and accountability. Larger charities are expected to report against the Charity Governance Code in their annual reports, and compliance is increasingly monitored by institutional donors, grant-making foundations and public funders.

Trustee Duties — Distinct from Commercial Directors

While trustees hold the same legal duties as company directors under the Companies Act (for charities that are also companies limited by guarantee), their primary duties as trustees under charity law add a layer of accountability that commercial directors do not face.

Charitable purpose accountability. Trustees must ensure that the charity’s resources are applied exclusively for its charitable purposes. Using charitable funds for activities that are outside the charity’s objects — or prioritising organisational survival over charitable purpose delivery — is a breach of trustee duty. Trustees who approve grant expenditure outside the charity’s objectives, or who allow surplus funds to accumulate without applying them to charitable activities, face regulatory sanction.

Public benefit requirement. Charities must demonstrate that their activities provide public benefit that is more than incidental — a legal requirement under the Charities Act 2011 that the CCEW actively monitors. Trustees are responsible for ensuring the charity can demonstrate and articulate its public benefit, which has governance implications for performance measurement, impact reporting and beneficiary engagement.

Conflict of interest management in charities. Charity law restricts trustees from benefiting financially from the charity they govern — a stricter conflict of interest framework than applies to commercial company directors. Trustees cannot receive payment for their trustee role without specific CCEW authorisation, cannot contract with the charity for paid services without authorisation and must manage conflicts of interest with particular rigour because the charity’s assets are held in trust for beneficiaries rather than for the benefit of any individual.

Safeguarding governance. Charities working with children, young people or adults at risk carry specific safeguarding obligations that trustee boards must actively oversee. The CCEW requires charities to report serious safeguarding incidents to the regulator and expects trustees to demonstrate proactive safeguarding governance — not merely reactive compliance when incidents occur. Trustees on charities with safeguarding responsibilities must complete appropriate safeguarding training and satisfy themselves that the charity’s safeguarding policies are implemented effectively.

Charity Financial Governance — SORP and Reserves

Charity financial governance has specific characteristics that differ from commercial company financial oversight and that require trustees with charity-sector financial experience rather than purely commercial financial backgrounds.

Charities SORP. Charities preparing accruals accounts under the Charities Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) — required for charities with income above £250,000 — follow a financial reporting framework that differs from both IFRS (used by listed companies) and FRS 102 (used by most UK companies). SORP accounts include a Statement of Financial Activities (SoFA) rather than a profit and loss account, and distinguish between restricted funds (given for a specific purpose and usable only for that purpose), unrestricted funds (available for any charitable purpose) and designated funds (unrestricted funds earmarked by trustees for specific purposes). A trustee serving on an audit committee or finance committee needs to understand the SORP framework to provide effective financial governance.

Reserves policy. The CCEW expects charities to have a documented reserves policy — a board-approved statement of how much unrestricted reserve the charity needs to maintain, why that level is appropriate and what the trustees will do if reserves fall below or exceed the target. The governance of reserves policy — reviewing it annually, ensuring it reflects current risk assessment and communicating it to stakeholders — is a specific trustee accountability that has no direct commercial equivalent.

Grant funding governance. Charities receiving significant income from grants — government departments, lottery funders, grant-making foundations or institutional donors — must comply with specific reporting and activity conditions attached to each grant. The governance of grant compliance — ensuring that grant-funded activities are delivered as committed, that restricted grant income is accounted for separately and that grant reporting obligations are met on time — is a primary financial governance function for many charity boards.

Charity Trustee Profiles Most Commonly Sought

Finance-qualified trustees. The most consistently sought trustee profile across the charity sector. Every charity of significant scale benefits from a trustee qualified in accounting or finance who can chair or contribute to the finance or audit committee — ensuring the management accounts, the SORP-compliant annual accounts and the charity’s financial controls receive genuinely expert board-level oversight. Finance experience in the charity sector specifically is more valuable than general commercial financial experience, because charity SORP, restricted fund accounting and reserves governance all have charity-specific dimensions that commercial accountants may not have encountered.

Legal trustees. Employment law (charities are often large employers with complex HR governance), charity law and regulatory compliance, property and lease governance, contractual governance for service delivery arrangements and safeguarding legal framework awareness are the most common legal expertise areas sought by charity boards. Legal trustees with charity sector experience are particularly valuable — the legal framework of charity governance has specific characteristics that general commercial lawyers may not be familiar with.

Sector-specific expertise. Health charities benefit from trustees with clinical governance or NHS experience; international development charities from trustees with international programmes or FCDO/NGO governance experience; environmental charities from those with environmental science or regulatory background; social welfare charities from those with social work, local authority or community development experience. Sector expertise gives trustees the credibility to challenge management’s programme and impact claims effectively.

Fundraising and income development. Trustees who can actively contribute to the charity’s income development — through personal giving, major donor introductions, corporate partnership relationships or grant-making foundation connections — provide a direct contribution to financial sustainability alongside their governance function. Many charity boards make this distinction explicit in their trustee recruitment briefs, particularly for chairs and for trustees who chair the fundraising or development committee.

Digital and technology governance. Charities are navigating significant digital transformation — CRM systems, digital fundraising, online service delivery, data analytics and increasingly AI-powered tools for beneficiary assessment and programme management. Trustees with digital and technology governance experience are increasingly sought as charity boards recognise the strategic importance of digital capability alongside its governance complexity (GDPR compliance, cybersecurity, technology vendor governance).

Diversity, equity and inclusion expertise. The Charity Governance Code’s equality, diversity and inclusion principle — and the CCEW’s increasing scrutiny of charity governance culture — creates specific demand for trustees who can advise on EDI strategy, challenge the board on its own diversity composition and support the organisation’s commitments to equitable service delivery and inclusive employment practice.

Lived experience of beneficiaries. Charities serving specific communities are increasingly expected — by the CCEW, by institutional funders and by the Charity Governance Code — to ensure that people with lived experience of the issues the charity addresses are represented at trustee level. This is not a tokenistic diversity aspiration but a governance quality requirement: boards that include trustees with direct experience of their beneficiary communities make better-informed decisions about the services they commission and deliver.

The Difference Between Trustee Recruitment and Volunteer Matching

Many charities attempt to fill trustee vacancies through generic volunteer matching platforms or by circulating opportunities through their existing networks. These approaches have a specific and significant limitation: they reach people who are actively seeking trustee roles rather than people who have the specific governance skills the charity needs and may not have considered it.

A structured trustee search — where the search begins from the charity’s specific governance requirements and proactively identifies candidates who meet those requirements — consistently produces candidates of higher governance relevance than a passive advertisement-based approach. Finance-qualified trustees who are already serving on two or three charity boards and would consider a third mandate for the right organisation, or legal trustees with specific charity sector experience who are selectively available, are not browsing volunteer matching platforms. Reaching them requires direct professional contact based on a clear understanding of their background and how it maps to the charity’s requirements.

NED Capital’s charity trustee search methodology applies the same proactive candidate identification approach we use for commercial NED searches — starting from the charity’s governance gap, profiling the candidate required and approaching individuals directly rather than waiting for applications. For finance committee chair appointments, legal trustee searches and sector-specialist trustee requirements, this methodology consistently produces candidates who would not have been identified through a passive advertisement approach.

Our Charity Board Search Process

We establish at brief stage the specific governance gap the trustee appointment is intended to address, the charity’s regulatory framework and any funder requirements that shape the trustee profile, the board’s diversity and inclusion objectives and the practical constraints (time commitment, geographic location, remuneration or expenses policy) that affect the candidate pool.

We assess candidates against the charity’s specific requirements — not against a generic trustee profile — and give specific attention to both governance capability and personal commitment to the charity’s mission. The most effective charity trustees combine genuine commitment to the charitable purpose with the specific governance skills the board needs; neither dimension alone is sufficient.

Adrian Lawrence FCA leads every charity board search personally. Shortlists typically within two to three weeks of mandate acceptance.