Trustee Roles (Secretary, Fundraising & Treasurer roles)

We're in need of a few more trustees at Help Close By following one of our most dedicated trustees stepping back due to berevement and a need to have more experienced people step into specific roles.

Help Close By is a charity working to address poverty with a hybrid model using data science to find people in need and support them through our apps or community based support. We've been working in Birmingham since 2020 but have national plans, which we hope to push forwards with once we evidence behind the next app we are developing, which if national would give the single most up to date and realistic picture of poverty in the UK (against reports that only come out once every 4 years). We have teams working both remotely and in-person in the community, we also have a freelance caseworking helping people in Birmingham.

Having done the role of treasurer by default, I'd rather give way to someone with experience with accounting and tax law. We lost a fantastic secretary and need some one who can organise meetings of the board, chase those with outstanding actions and minute our meetings and support our reporting with the treasurer to keep us transparent and accountable. Finally, we also need to look at creating a fundraising team to look at grants and donations in a more deliberate way, and without the distraction of involvement in other aspects of operation - having done okay at this myself, ofter we have periods where we're not pursuing grants as there's just a lot of other things to do. We'd like to fix that and make sure someone is always keeping an eye on this.

We'd like trustees based in Birmingham if possible. We do meet only but if we have Birmingham based trustees we could finally have the odd meeting in person after 6 years of online only. I'm mindful of people lives and other commitment so would be happy to continue mostly online if that's all people can do, and if it meant more time for actions between meetings.

All trustees will have work and specific responsibilities between board meetings, which are a mininium of once a quater with an expectation of timely responses to electronic votes on any authorisations needed between meetings.