Research Findings: Federated charities support for trustees & boards

Research Findings: Governance at Scale: How federated charities can strengthen support for trustees and boards.

Read about the findings of Eastside People’s latest research into how federated charities support governance across their networks, and the barriers and opportunities they identify in strengthening support for trustees and boards.

Watch a recording of the report author, Penny Wilson, presenting the findings at the research launch in July 2026, and download the slides.

Recommendations from the research

There is no doubt that a federated structure enables charities to attain a higher level of effective governance than average in the charity sector.

However, there is real opportunity to go further to support effective governance, and the report made some recommendations about how federations could achieve this:

1. Build direct trustee communication channels between trustees across the federation
2. Map governance trends and challenges to enable federations to identify shared approaches to prevent challenges, promote good governance and support innovation.
3. Research the needs of trustees across the federation, with the aim of reviewing and developing support programmes
4. Review the balance of reactivity and proactivity in governance support offers
5. Develop trustee learning and networking programmes
6. Improve trustee succession pipelines, including collecting better data on trustee attributes
7. Use trustee expertise in local charities as a resource for the whole federation
8. Build stronger shared learning between governance-support functions across federations.

Watch the recording of the report presentation

You can download the slides used in the session here and download the final report via the button below.

Your ongoing input to federated charities research recommendations

Following the launch event in July 2026, Eastside People is now convening a group of colleagues from federated charities to look at the recommendations in more detail. If you are interested in knowing more about this group, please email [email protected].