One Pair of Hands: A Month in the Life of the Trustee Who Holds Everything Together

On the first Tuesday of the month, Margaret Errington arrives at a converted scout hut in Seaham twenty minutes before anyone else. She unlocks the door, switches on the heaters, checks the fire extinguisher is still in date, and sets out chairs for the committee of the small youth charity she has chaired — and, in practice, largely run — for eleven years.

There are three other trustees on paper. One moved to Australia in 2019 and never resigned. One signed up through a friend and has attended a single meeting. The third is Margaret's sister, who helps when she can. Between them, they are responsible for a turnover of roughly £48,000, a part-time youth worker, a building held on a peppercorn lease, and the safeguarding of around sixty young people.

The Arithmetic of Governance

The Charity Commission expects trustees to govern collectively. In theory, decisions are shared, risks are distributed, and no single individual bears the weight of an organisation. In practice, across thousands of small charities in the UK, that theory has quietly collapsed. Surveys of the sector consistently suggest that a significant proportion of organisations with income under £100,000 function with only two or three active trustees — and many with, effectively, one.

Margaret's month illustrates what that looks like. In October alone, she chaired one formal meeting, signed off two invoices, chased the heating oil supplier, completed a section of a grant return she did not fully understand, attended a safeguarding refresher arranged by the local authority, and spent a Sunday afternoon reconciling the bank statements against the receipts in a shoebox. On the eleventh of the month, at ten past two in the morning, she lay awake wondering whether the charity's public liability insurance covered the trampoline.

It did. She checked the next day. But the worry had already done its work.

Goodwill Is Not a Structure

It would be easy to frame this as a story about one remarkable woman, and in many ways it is. Margaret is diligent, careful and deeply embedded in her community. The young people who use the hut on Wednesdays and Fridays have no idea how precarious the structure above them is, and in one sense that is a tribute to her.

But goodwill is not a governance structure. When a single trustee holds the institutional memory, the bank mandate, the safeguarding knowledge and the relationships with funders, the charity is one fall, one bereavement or one loss of confidence away from closure. Funders see the symptom without ever seeing the cause: applications that arrive late, monitoring returns that go quiet, projects that end abruptly not because the work failed but because the person carrying it could no longer carry it.

We have written before about the part-time fundraisers who hold small charities together. The lone trustee is their quieter counterpart — less visible, because governance happens behind closed doors, and often more isolated, because there is no team to share the burden with.

What Funders Can Reasonably Do

The Fraser Thomson Foundation funds organisations of exactly this size, and we have had to reckon honestly with our own role in this picture. Some of what funders can do is modest but real:

• Fund the governance, not just the delivery. A small allocation for trustee training, bookkeeping software or an independent examination of accounts is often the difference between a resilient organisation and a fragile one.
• Accept that capacity is uneven. Rigid reporting deadlines fall hardest on the volunteer doing three roles at once. Flexibility here is not laxity; it is realism.
• Pay for cover. Where a grant funds a coordinator or development worker, that post is also, in effect, a resilience grant for the trustees above it.
• Ask the question directly. Our application forms now ask how many trustees attend meetings regularly and who holds the bank mandate. The answers have been instructive, and occasionally alarming.

There is also a wider recruitment problem that no single funder can solve. Trustee boards across the UK skew older and more experienced than the communities they serve, and the pipeline of people willing to take on legal responsibility for a small charity — with all the liability and none of the salary — is thin and thinning.

The Cost of Carrying It

We asked Margaret what would happen if she stopped. She thought about it for a while. 'The hut would shut within three months,' she said. 'The young people would find something else, I expect. They always do. But I'd know.'

That sentence — I'd know — is the engine of a great deal of British charitable provision. It is also, if we are honest, a quiet indictment of it. Communities should not depend on the conscience of individuals to keep the lights on. Yet across the country, in market towns and coastal estates and city suburbs, they do.

The least funders can do is stop treating that dependence as invisible. The most we can do is fund the structures that let Margaret sleep at two in the morning — and, one day, hand her the keys without being the only person who knows how to use them.