Become a trustee
Fancy helping steer PSS in the right direction? Become a trustee!
Are you a graduate of the university of life? Have you used ours or other services before (and know what a great service looks like)? Or have you got professional skills to offer? If you nodded your head furiously to any of these, read on!
We’re looking for a new trustee to be part of our gang. We’ve got 12 trustees at the moment – and you could join them! Our current trustees have lots of different backgrounds – we’ve got lawyers, PR experts, mechanical engineers, financial experts, Chartered surveyors, police constables, and education experts. But they all have one thing in common: they’re all committed people who have PSS’s best interests at heart.
By becoming a PSS trustee, you could use your life experience to help make PSS the best it can be.
Who do we need right now?
We’re on the look-out for someone who has social care expertise.
Since social care is our bread and butter we need someone who lives and breathes it to steer our board using their knowledge. The lion’s share of our services are commissioned – so someone who understands this sort of landscape is essential. Not only do we want someone who has this experience, we also need someone who buys into our philosophy. And that philosophy is very simple – it’s that the people we support matter the most. We want someone who believes that good social care can be truly life enhancing and that it all starts with the individual that’s being supported.
However, it’s not just about what you can bring, it’s about who you are, too.
Values are a really big deal at PSS – they’re not something someone in the marketing team comes up with and puts on the website to sound good. Created by our own employees to reflect some of the personal traits PSS people have, our values are the key to what makes our culture so unique; they’re a reflection of who each of us are and they’re embedded in everything we do. Sometimes other organisations approach us and ask how we managed to make our culture so strong. Our answer is really simple: we only employ genuine, determined, professional, open-minded and big-hearted people – and that goes for who we choose to be our trustees, too.
What does a PSS trustee do, anyway?
PSS has what we call a Board of Trustees. This is a team of people who meet up four times a year with a job to do: to make sure PSS is and stays brilliant.
This next bit sounds a bit daunting at first, but here goes: our Board of Trustees take ultimate responsibility for everything we do here. By being a trustee, you’ll also be a director of PSS (fancy), and it’ll be your job to help us make sure we’re doing what we say we will properly, fairly, to the best of our ability and when we say we’ll do it. You’ll do that by using your skills and experience (whether that’s life experience or professional experience) to help us make decisions.
Here’s Julie, one of our current trustees, telling you a bit about her role as a trustee:
What does the job involve?
Being a trustee’s a big job – and as you might have already gathered, it’s a responsible one. Our trustees have legal responsibilities as directors of PSS, a limited liability company. Things like being legally responsible for the company’s records, accounts and performance. The great news is, we’ve got our own quality team at PSS who have the expertise to help make sure our board is fulfilling its legal job.
You can have a look at the job description to find out the nitty gritty about what the job entails, but, in summary, here are the seven key things you’ll need to do, along with your fellow trustees:
- Make sure things are done properly and that everything is above board
- Take ultimate responsibility for everything PSS does
- Act reasonably and carefully in all things related to PSS
- Safeguard and protect the assets of PSS
- Do things in partnership with our other trustees
- Do things in the best interests of PSS
- Avoid any conflict between your personal interests and those of PSS
Why do we need a new trustee?
We turned 101 this year, we’re growing faster than you can say ‘PSS’, and we need some extra bods on our already-brilliant Board to help make us even stronger, and to help us on plan to be around for future generations (read more about our Big Plan and how you can help us achieve it in our PSS trustee recruitment pack).
How to apply
If this sounds like a job for you, the first thing you need to do is have a good shufty at our trustee recruitment pack. In there you’ll find all the details you need to know about being a trustee – from how much time you’ll need to give up to how many committees you’d need to be on and when, if you were successful, we’d want you to come and meet us.
As well as the recruitment pack, you’ll also want to read the full trustee job description and person specification, which will tell you exactly what the job involves in full, exactly what we’re looking for, how to apply and what happens after we receive your application.
If all that’s hunky dory, it’s time to apply!
Send your application to Mandy, who is our executive business partner, by Monday 9th March 2020 at 5pm.
Email your application to mandy.howe@pss.org.uk
Or post it to:
Mandy Howe
PSS
Eleanor Rathbone House
Connect Business Village
24 Derby Road
Liverpool
L5 9PR