Chair of Trustees - The Children's Book Project

We are a young, rapidly growing charity set up to tackle book poverty nationwide and to improve the outcomes of young people across the UK. We seek an energetic and supportive new Chair for our next phase of growth.

Who we are

The Children’s Book Project is a grassroots charity that understands the enormous power that reading has in shaping children’s lives. We have an ambition to eradicate book poverty and believe that, regardless of their circumstances, every child deserves access to inspiring reading material, expanding their perspective on the world and helping them to fulfil their potential. We collect new and lightly used books from families and publishers and gift them onwards to children growing up in poverty,

The role

1. We want to change mindsets2. We will proactively collaborate3. We need to build authorityWe will continue to focus on developing a sustainable funding model, will continue to conduct various strands of research that evidence impacts amongst our beneficiary audiences, seek to raise our profile further within the publishing and educational sectors and to develop a robust national programme of delivery.

The Chair will provide inclusive leadership to the Board of Trustees, ensuring that each Trustee fulfils their responsibilities for effective charity governance and their engagement with our disparate activities including regionally, operationally and from an audience perspective.

The Chair will also support the executive team, acting as a mentor to and building a solid working with the Chief Executive.

GovernanceStrategyFinanceMentorship:

• Act as an ambassador and public face of the charity together with the CEO

Charity governance; Commercial acumen, Finance & accounting; Fundraising; Human resources; Legal; Sector expertise (e.g. literacy, social policy or publishing); Experience in scaling a charity.

We also hope that the Chair will bring the following strengths to the role:

• in children’s lives and the impact of book poverty.
• , objectives and values.
• and the ability to chair meetings effectively.
• in the best interests of all stakeholders.
• and understanding.An understanding of trustees’ legal duties
• (or a commitment to gaining this)
• (and a commitment to expanding this).
• As we actively seek to increase the diversity of our trustee board, we welcome any candidate who can contribute diversity to the Board in its widest sense, including diversity of background, life experience and career. We know that different voices, ideas and perspectives will enable us to better tackle book poverty and deepen our impact.If you like the sound of this role but don’t quite meet all of the criteria, we still encourage you to apply.We are very open to first time trustees joining the board.We particularly encourage applications from candidates who have childhood or adult experience of life on a lower income, and from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME), LGBT+, disabled and socially diverse candidates.