Organisational governance

Why we want carers involved

We want to ensure that decisions made throughout the organisation are always based on what carers need.
Decision-making must be transparent – It’s not enough just to say you are involving carers and listening to their voices – it needs to be visible to funders, donors, employees and most importantly carers.
A combination of approaches are needed to show how carers voices feed into decision-making at the highest level.
Trustees have a balance between responding to the voice of carers and their wider responsibilities as trustees (e.g. ensuring the organisation acts legally and isn’t put at risk).

Regular opportunities for carers to connect directly to trustees and senior managers – we will ensure that they routinely go to carers, not just expect carers to go to them.
Carers will be able to send messages directly to the chief executive and the chair of trustee board if they have any carer issues that they want to raise.
We will ensure that in addition to the relevant professional experience/skills, there is always lived experience of carers/caring on the board.
Getting involved with setting the future direction of the organisation (e.g. organisational strategy planning, business planning).
We will ensure that for any new organisational policies we complete a carers’ impact assessment, so that we take into account how it might affect employees who are carers.
Trustees will also review the trends/patterns being identified so that they can ensure we are responding to any changes.
We will also look to ensure carer representation on our internal employees forum.
The carer voice and involvement steering group is going to formally link into our trustee board

If carers have raised a specific issue that is to be discussed by our senior management/trustees, they will be invited to the relevant part of the meeting to talk directly about it t30o the senior managers/trustees.•
Where any issues raised by carers (directly or indirectly), are discussed at our senior management/trustee board meetings, we will share the outcome via our ‘you said, we did’ section of our website.
We will ensure that individual carers who raise issues/ask questions to the senior management/trustees receive direct feedback in relation to their involvement.