Trustee meetings are an important way for trustees to come together and make decisions about the charity collectively. However, in order for decisions made at a meeting to be valid, the meeting must be held in accordance with the charity’s governing document. This is especially important in a post COVID era where many charities choose to hold their meetings online. Unless your charity’s governing document expressly permits meetings to be held electronically, decisions made at an online meeting will not be valid.
What should you do?
Firstly, you should certainly double check your charity’s governing document for the charity’s rules about meetings. It is essential that a charity follows the concept of holding a valid meeting, complying with any specific requirements in your charity’s governing document and ensuring that everyone at the meeting can see and hear each other.
Secondly, consider the methods your charity currently uses and would like to use to hold meetings.
There are three ways which your charity can hold meetings.
- a traditional face-to-face meeting.
- a virtual meeting where everyone joins the meeting electronically (i.e. Teams or Zooms etc).
- a “hybrid meeting” where some people meet face to face whilst others join the meeting virtually.
If you want to hold virtual and hybrid meetings, the Charity Commission requires an express power to hold electronic meetings in your charity’s governing document.
Your governing document should include:
- Whether all your charity meetings could be virtual or hybrid
- How you give notice of virtual and hybrid meetings
- How you will hold votes at virtual and hybrid meetings
- How you may adjourn virtual and hybrid meetings
Further, the Charity Commission recommends that the governing document include how people can ask questions, join in the debate and finally, what would happen to the meeting if there were technical problems if the charity chooses to hold meetings virtually.
If your charity’s current governing document does not include any provisions about charity meetings, or does not include the power to hold electronic meetings, then we strongly recommend that you seek to amend your governing document.
This is something our Charity Department can certainly help with, so please do not hesitate to get in touch today or if you have any general questions on the Charity Commission’s recent update.