Leah Selinger on Trusteeship: Navigating Changing Times with Confidence
The Hertfordshire Trustees Conference 2025 will bring together trustees, charity leaders, and sector experts to reflect on the realities of trusteeship in an uncertain climate. This year’s theme focuses on navigating changing times with confidence. Find out more and register here.
In the lead-up to the event, Leah Selinger, Chair of Watford Women’s Centre and keynote speaker at the conference this year, shared her perspective on the challenges facing trustees today, and the key messages she will be highlighting in her keynote.
This year’s conference focuses on navigating changing times with confidence. From your perspective, what are the biggest challenges trustees face in today’s uncertain climate?
We’re experiencing a time which sees charities facing a range of pressures, including rising demand for services, a tough economic climate with squeezed budgets, and growing social and political instability. It’s our role as trustees to securely hold our governance responsibilities – guarding for the future of our organisations and ensuring we manage risk, whilst also ensuring we meet the needs of the people, communities or spaces we seek to support.
When times are uncertain it’s hard to balance this effectively. Do you spend to create essential change or opportunities for your beneficiaries, or build your reserves whilst you can to prepare for uncertain times ahead? How do you support your staff or volunteers in a way that balances their desire to support people in their community with their own wellbeing?
As a trustee, our role has to be a strategic but also a pragmatic one, and our ability to take effective, educated decisions is essential. Our challenge is to balance this – and to know when to step in, when to step back, and how to balance the different perspectives we bring as trustees so that we help rather than hinder our organisations.
Your keynote is about the realities of trusteeship today. What key insights do you hope trustees will take away from your talk?
I hope trustees leave with a clearer sense of what it really means to be a strategic leader - beyond compliance, beyond operations, and in the context of what their organisation most needs right now.
I’m looking forward to sharing some practical ideas and reflections that will help trustees understand their role with more confidence: how to strike the right balance of support and challenge, how to stay connected to the reality of their charity, and how to work collectively as a board.
Most importantly, I want people to feel reassured that trusteeship is complex because it should be - and that it’s possible to navigate that complexity with clarity and purpose.