Job Description

Could you apply your professional skills to support our organisation to empower disadvantaged people to have a strong voice, and support them to transform their lives?

VoiceAbility is looking for people to join its Board of Trustees, and we are keen to hear from people who have the business and professional skills to help lead our organisation, and support us to achieve our social mission to strengthen voices, support rights, and change lives.

What does VoiceAbility do?

VoiceAbility supports disabled people and people  who  face  disadvantage  or  discrimination  to  have  a  voice  that  counts.  We lead work to ensure that  people  are  supported  to  have  control  over  their  lives  and  we  have  pioneered  ways  of  enabling  people  to  be  heard  and  have  their  rights  respected.  We put the people we  work  with  at  the  heart  of  our  organisation  and  have  developed  high  quality  services.  As  a  result,  we  have  become  one  of  the  largest  providers  of  advocacy  and  user  co-produced  services  in  the  UK.

We work with people with mental health issues, disabilities, learning disabilities, and people with dementia and autism to make sure that their voices are heard and their rights are respected. We are passionate about supporting people to have choice and control in their lives.

We have 300 members of staff, and our advocates support over 30,000 people every year. We are a national charity and work in many areas across England. We have an annual turnover of £9million.

Our Trustees play an integral role in leading our charity to achieve its social mission, strategic aims and objectives. Now is a particularly exciting time to join our organisation, as  we  focus  on  growing  our  social  impact  through  developing  current  and  new  approaches  to  respond  to  people  who  want  and  need  our  support.

Our  strategy  is  aimed  at  ensuring  that  we  continue  to  improve  what  we  do,  achieve  greater  social  impact,  and  operate  more  effectively  and  efficiently.  Our  focus  is  on  quality  and  performance  improvement,  sustainability,  and  diversifying  our  services,  in  order  to  meet  our  social  mission  more  fully. If you have a passion for our mission, and you have the commercial, strategic, and financial acumen to support us to meet our strategic objectives, we would be delighted to hear from you.

We are most interested in hearing from people who have one or more of the following.

• Strong commercial and financial skills. People who are able to challenge and support the executive team when developing business plans and models.
• Full accountancy qualifications.
• Experience of new services, developing and marketing new products.
• Legal understanding for example from health, social care or company law or similar.
• Experience as disabled people or as people with long-term health conditions or as carers AND who can use this experience to think about how VoiceAbility needs to develop and change

Location and time commitment

Trustees need to work 6 - 8 days per year in total; more if you are also a member of a subcommittee. This includes coming to four Board meetings per year, held alternately in London and Cambridge.

As we are a national organisation, Trustees may need to travel to other places in England to see some of the work that we do. We will help with travel arrangements.

Pay

Trustee positions are not remunerated but expenses (for example travel) will be reimbursed.