Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations

Continuing on the theme of leadership, you've got a strong track record of sitting on charity boards.

You've been in that for about 17 years and you are, of course, a board member here at SCVO.

Prior to that, you were on the board of local charities.

So what was it that motivated you to join the SCVO board? And how does the experience of sitting on the board of a national charity compare to that of a local charity?

So, yes, I mean, I take great pride in my kind of role with SCBO as a trustee.

And likewise, when I've been involved in other charities before at a governance level, I've had exactly the same point of pride.

It was about working with a very local community.

It was about creating opportunity for young people and starting something new.

to sort of considering that an awful lot of these women's charities are very small.

They are therefore reliant on the umbrella bodies to give them advice, and the NTVO and the SCVO, they are exactly those organisations, and you would expect them to be offering training information, legal guidance to their members and again very scant information available from those organisations and in fact evidence that they are relying on people to provide external training to them and their members who take a very strongly trans activist position on this issue.

So not only are they not giving good advice to their members, but they're actually seeking out very one-sided advice from external organisations and organisations who we know who have been influential in the public sector and the private sector in changing policies um so that's that's a matter of great concern i mean the one or the one regulator who we hadn't really hadn't crossed our path but hopefully through karen's advice is is one that might be worth considering for you know wrm members who want to take things further is the um There's a fundraising regulator for the UK and they've got a code of practice for fundraising.

So a small number of the charities that we reviewed have in fact changed their charitable objects to include, to have more than women as beneficiaries, but they in their name are using women and they're still soliciting funds from people on the basis that those funds are going to support women or women and girls.

And it was through that that I started to get more involved in the kind of more digital inclusion aspect, as it was more about that kind of youth, um, uh, maker space, you know, like 3D printing and, you know, creating things and all that kind of hacking and stuff like that.

When I came out the end of all of that and finished up with youth work at that point, I then got involved with the current role, um, at SCVO, learning all these kind of digital inclusion considerations, um, that I had taken from my youth work practice.

Thanks, Darren.

I think you've made a really important point there that there is no one path into the charity sector, and the skills and experience you're gaining in other sectors and other jobs give you those skills that can be transferred into the sector.

There's a mental health crisis in third sector leadership right now.

SCVO, Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, released some research about, I think, a third of leaders in the charity sector are thinking about leaving in the next 12 months.

I've never in my lifetime in my career seen as serious a risk to the sector as this.

And of course I would say this because of my coach and I, you know, in particular help people work on the sort of inner game of, of, you know, resilience and wellbeing at work.