Governance is important. Why?

Because it’s in the top three of what the public say is important in order for them to trust charities. They want to see charities are being ‘run well’. They want to know that the money or time they choose to put into your organisation is well looked after. In fact they expect it.

I’m privileged to sit on Scotland’s Third Sector Governance Forum as a representative from OSCR. It’s a board made up of governance geeks from across the whole of the third sector. We seek to understand and facilitate ways to help third sector leaders understand about Trustees’ Week -  find out more about us here.

When a newly revised version of the Governance Code for charities in England and Wales was published last year, it inspired the Forum to, not only create a Code for Scotland, but for the wider Third Sector. We also took inspiration from the Northern Irish Code and our vision of a Code was developed further. We wanted to create a tool that helped third sector organisations no matter what size and recognised a set of principles would not be enough to help people on their good governance journey. So we are striving to create an online tool with information and resources to help people understand the principles of good governance, do a bit of self-assessment around the governance of their organisation and then be able to access information that is pertinent to the areas where assistance is required. So hopefully this will help people to address the practical side of things, or at the very least, get people talking and thinking about governance!

Following a successful bid for a small pot of money from Scottish Government we were off! We’ve reviewed a number of Codes, drafted some principles then consulted on these at The Gathering in February of this year. We’ve since spent time refining these principles, putting them into plain English and producing, we believe to be, a Governance Code that covers everything you need to know.

We want to make sure we’ve created a Code that’s for the sector, by the sector -  so we need the help of third sector leaders and advisors to make sure we’ve got it right. From Chief Executives to charity trustees, director of a social enterprise, committee members of voluntary organisations, TSIs, lawyers or the public – we’d really appreciate it if you could take some time to respond to our consultation by viewing the Code and completing the very short survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/ScotGovCode .

The consultation runs from from the 4^th July to the 3^rd of August 2018.