You are in the ‘Be a Trustee’ section of the SCVO website, where you can find out everything you need to know about being a trustee of a charity / voluntary organisation.

The 'Be A Trustee' website was made possible thanks to the kind generosity of MacRoberts Solicitors.
  
MacRoberts specialises in corporate and commercial law but the firms highly qualified lawyers offer advice on a wide range of legal areas, including charity law. The firm works with an extensive range of charities and prides itself on being highly-attuned to its clients’ varied needs. For more information about MacRoberts
vist their website.

This page explains how you can 'Be a Trustee!'

There are 3 main ways to ‘Be a Trustee’ in Scotland.

1) Find an opportunity on the Volunteer Scotland database operated by Volunteer Development Scotland (VDS).
All over Scotland there are Volunteer Centres that collect local information about volunteering opportunities in their area, including trustee work (or as the VDS database more correctly refers to it ‘committee work’). They feed their information into a one-stop-shop central database. VDS have kindly enabled SCVO to reproduce a list of these opportunties here. If you are interested in the wider work of VDS then visit their website.

2) Approach a voluntary organisation / charity of your choice and ask them if they have any trustee opportunities.
If you know the exact organisation to which you’d like to offer your services as a trustee then you should contact them directly. If you only know the type of work that you would like to be involved with (for example, youth work, health improvement, environment) you can search for organisations that do it in three ways:

• a) Search the Workwithus.org charity database. You can search by a broad range of ‘charitable causes’ and geographical area of operation. 
  
• b) Contact your local Council for Voluntary Service (CVS)
  Many CVS have their own database of local organisations and can point you in the right direction. But please note that some do not and they may refer you back to VDS and the volunteer centres. Find your local CVS by using the interactive map.
  
• c) Search the charity database of the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR). You can search by charitable purpose but not, as yet, by geographical area of operation. 

3) Keep an eye on

• the Good Moves website; charity and voluntary sector recruitment in Scotland and Wales.
  the recruitment section of Third Force News (TFN), Scotland’s voluntary sector newspaper.  If you would like to subscribe to the paper copy of TFN click here or, for the online version, click here.

Good Moves and TFN typically contain advertisements for paid staff positions but voluntary organisations do advertise for trustees there as well.

Still wondering “Is being a trustee for me?” If so; why not try our interactive quiz and find out!

Do you want to be clear about what a trustee is and what they do? then see our Roles and Responsibilities page for further details

Wondering if there is support for trustees? There is! Lots! And it's all on our Governance pages.

Perhaps you're looking for trustees? Look no further! Just click here for tips on how to Find a Trustee.