News: Board development update

A reflection on our Board development - Raji Hunjan, CEO

This month we launched our second round of recruitment for Board members. We are hoping that new appointments can by made by 30th June so that incoming trustees are able to join us at our staff and trustee away day on 8th July 2024.

Currently, Tudor has a blended Board of long-standing trustees who are exiting and newly appointed trustees. Together they are rebuilding the Board culture and model of governance.

Earlier in April, the new Board met formally in person for the first time. The energy and commitment to moving the organisation forward and re-opening our grant-making was very evident, and it was encouraging to see the Board agree a strategic road map towards making a small number of new grants in the Autumn.

The Board also received a report from a group of consultants we commissioned - Stephen Bediako, Fancy Sinantha and Louise Mousseau – who gave an overview of the wider philanthropic landscape. Their report included examples from Foundations in the USA and Canada and challenged the Board to consider how they might:

• Pursue a total asset impact return, which means a strategy aligned for our grant-making and investments.
• Act and learn, which means testing through grant-making and using this to learn and develop our longer-term funding strategy.
• Centre racial justice in an intersectional approach.
• Be intentional and thoughtful in approaches to risks by, sharing risk with staff and wider stakeholders.

We are hoping to publish a version of the report in the coming weeks.

Decisions made at the April Board meeting paved the way for the recruitment of new staff and preparation for the 8th July away day. The focus of the away day will be working together to embed learning into our emerging strategy and how we share power with our grantee partners. As for staff recruitment, we are not expecting it to be too long before we can begin to announce new colleagues.

The April Board meeting also saw the formal resignations of three retiring Board members. We are grateful to Holly Baine, James Long and Francis Runacres for their contributions and leadership over the years.

There is still so much opportunity for new Board members to contribute to the shaping of the new Tudor and helping us to move forward as we bridge from the past to the organisation we want to become in the future.

Please take a look at our trustee recruitment pack and share it with your network: https://tudor-trustees.co.uk/. You can get in touch with Cadence Partners for more information.

You can also see who are current trustees are here.

We are grateful to our growing team of consultants for working with us to help us to get to where we are:

• Fancy Sinantha, Louise Mousseau and Stephen Bediako have provided us with thought leadership.
• Nina Kowalska has worked with me and the team on communications and strategy development.
• Vanessa Johnson Burgess from A Little Bit of HR is working with the Board and the leadership team on people, culture and behaviour. We are also very grateful to Priya Cinar, who is on secondment with us from Inclusive Recruiting and who has overseen recruitment and the development of staff policies, amongst many other things we’ve asked her to lead on!
• Also to Josimar Senior for headshots and photographs.

I am looking forward to sharing more details about the emerging staff team in the next few weeks.