Governance and facilities manager volunteer roles

We’re Searching for a Brilliant Organiser & Governance Champion — Could It Be You?

Unlock YOUR Potential is a brand‑new East London charity with a bold mission: to open doors for adults who need support, confidence, and real opportunities to move forward in their careers and lives. Through employability skills, mentoring, coaching, and community‑driven programmes, we’re here to help people step into their future with pride and possibility.

But every impactful charity needs someone who keeps everything running smoothly behind the scenes — someone who brings order, clarity, and good governance to the heart of the organisation.

And that’s where you come in.

We’re looking for a volunteer Charity Administrator & Board Secretary to support our operations and ensure strong governance from day one.

Just a few hours a week — but with the power to shape the professionalism, structure, and effectiveness of our charity.

What this role is all about

You’ll help us:

• Manage the day‑to‑day admin that keeps the charity running smoothly

• Support the Board of Trustees with agendas, minutes, and governance tasks

• Maintain accurate records, policies, and compliance documents

• Coordinate meetings and ensure we follow good practice

• Help set up simple, effective administrative systems

• Act as the non‑trustee Board Secretary, ensuring clarity and accountability

• Support the founders as we move from set‑up to launch and beyond

Your work will help us stay organised, compliant, and ready to deliver life‑changing support across East London.

Who we hope to find

Someone who:

• Loves organisation, structure, and keeping things on track

• Enjoys admin and takes pride in accuracy and clarity

• Understands (or is keen to learn about) charity governance and good practice

• Wants to give back in a way that strengthens a whole organisation

• Can offer a few hours a week to help build our foundation

• Feels energised by supporting a mission that changes lives

Why your contribution matters

• You won’t just be doing admin — you’ll be shaping the backbone of our charity.
• You’ll help us operate professionally, transparently, and confidently.
• You’ll ensure our Board is supported, our records are accurate, and our governance is strong.
• And you’ll play a vital role in helping us launch a charity that East London can trust and rely on.

Your organisation becomes the engine that powers our mission.

If you’re passionate about organisation, community, and making a real difference in East London and beyond, this is your moment.

Join us. Help build the structure that unlocks someone’s future.

At this exciting time, the Base71 Youth Zone team is seeking to strengthen its Board of Trustees, expanding to bring in fresh perspectives, skills, and experience. We are currently looking to appoint a Vice Chair.

This is a rare opportunity to be part of a project of real scale and ambition. As Base71 continues to grow and make a lasting impact, you’ll play a key role in shaping its future—helping to create meaningful, positive change for young people across Barnsley, both now and for years to come.

We’re looking for someone with a strong understanding of governance, alongside the ability to provide strategic oversight and support. Just as important is your commitment to inclusion, safeguarding, and ensuring that young people’s voices remain at the heart of everything the organisation does.

In this role, you will:

• Ensure the charity operates within the requirements and rules set out in its governing document, remaining true to its charitable purpose and objectives
• Support compliance with relevant legislation and any regulatory bodies overseeing the charity’s activities
• Work closely with the Chair to review Board skills and diversity, implement annual reviews and trustee self-assessments, and identify development needs
• Oversee the recruitment, registration, and induction of new trustees
• Deputise for the Chair when required, acting as a trusted sounding board and intermediary for fellow trustees where appropriate

If you’re ready to bring your expertise, insight, and passion to a forward-thinking organisation, we would love you to consider finding out more about the difference you could make in Barnsley—for today and for tomorrow.

African Development Choices (ADC) is a UK-registered charity on a mission to reduce poverty by empowering communities to make more informed choices in the management of public resources.

ADC’s purpose is to enable communities to independently meet their needs for essential services, such as clean water and safe sanitation, and improve lives in Africa.

At ADC we encourage a working culture of seeking and giving input, showing and taking initiative, and commitment to the organisation and its purpose.

We now have an exciting opportunity for a volunteer Senior AI Agent Architect to join ADC and help build a live prototype of MajiGuard AI.

Main purpose of job:

To lead the technical design and hands-on development of MajiGuard AI, an agentic AI prototype that helps ADC identify underused WASH resources, structure recovery and reallocation cases, and verify that recovered value reaches facility upgrades and operations and maintenance.

Division: Technology / AI Innovation

Department: Product & Engineering

Position reports to: Head of AI Innovation

Direct reports for the position: Volunteer AI engineers, developers and technical contributors

Main Duties & Responsibilities:

• Lead the end-to-end architecture of MajiGuard AI, including the selection and integration of models, agent workflows, orchestration tools, retrieval systems, data structures and human-in-the-loop controls appropriate for a live prototype.

• Translate ADC’s operational goals into practical AI workflows, especially for identifying underused WASH resources, standardising evidence and case preparation, supporting recovery and reallocation decisions, and verifying delivery of value to facility improvements and ongoing operations and maintenance.

• Build and iterate a live prototype using pragmatic, cost-effective tooling, with strong attention to reliability, traceability, security, maintainability and ease of future scaling.

• Design structured inputs, prompts, evaluation criteria and decision logic so that outputs are useful to non-technical ADC teams working across programmes, research, partnerships and leadership.

• Establish a technical roadmap for the prototype, including architecture choices, milestone planning, testing priorities, deployment options and documentation for future funders, partners and developers.

• Work closely with ADC leadership to shape the product vision and ensure the prototype aligns with ADC’s wider governance and public service innovation model.

• Advise on suitable approaches for data governance, privacy, model risk, hallucination control, auditability and responsible AI use in the context of public-resource management and service delivery.

• Define and monitor prototype success metrics, including usefulness, accuracy, turnaround time, workflow fit, and operational learning that can strengthen grant applications, partnerships and future product development.

• Support the transition from local experimentation to a live prototype environment, including basic cloud or hosted deployment thinking, version control practices and engineering handover readiness.

• Mentor and coordinate other volunteer technical contributors where relevant, helping ADC build a small but high-quality AI capability around MajiGuard AI.

Knowledge, skills, and experience:

Essential

• 8+ years of relevant experience in AI, machine learning, applied NLP, intelligent automation, agentic systems, or modern software engineering for production-grade data or AI products

• Strong hands-on experience designing and building AI systems, including LLM-based applications, retrieval-augmented generation, agent workflows, orchestration frameworks, evaluation pipelines and API integrations

• Experience taking ideas from concept or prototype stage into a usable live product, pilot or production-like environment

• Excellent technical judgement on model selection, system design trade-offs, latency, reliability, observability and cost-conscious engineering

• Strong programming ability, ideally including Python and modern backend tooling, with the ability to work across architecture, implementation and troubleshooting

• Experience designing structured workflows where AI outputs must be reviewable, auditable and useful for operational decision-making
• Ability to simplify complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and translate mission goals into practical product choices
• Interest in using AI to strengthen public service delivery, accountability, governance, resource allocation, or adjacent social impact problems
• Ability to actively take initiative and help set things up in a start-up environment
• Ability to actively seek and give input in a collaborative team environment
• A committed team player with good communication skills
• Available to volunteer at least 8-12 hours a week

Desirable

• Experience with agentic AI products involving workflow automation, task routing, multi-step reasoning, document intelligence or evidence-based case management
• Experience with cloud deployment, containerisation, CI/CD, databases, vector stores, authentication and production monitoring for AI systems
• Experience working on civic tech, govtech, development, WASH, infrastructure, audit, compliance or public-finance-related products
• Experience working in an early-stage start-up or mission-driven organisation and comfortable operating with ambiguity
• Experience mentoring engineers or leading small technical teams across different locations and time zones

What ADC Offers You

This is a volunteer, remote and unpaid position with the following benefits:

• A chance to play a foundational role in shaping MajiGuard AI from concept into a live prototype with real strategic relevance to ADC’s mission
• An opportunity to apply advanced AI and product-building skills to a meaningful public-interest challenge connected to WASH, accountability and service delivery in Africa
• An opportunity to work with a diverse global team and contribute to an organisation seeking systemic social change
• Professional learning, leadership and portfolio-building opportunities through high-ownership work
• Work reference provided

This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.

Here at African Development Choices, we celebrate diversity, equity, and inclusion. Our teams are made up of people from all over the world and we welcome all applications. If you are disabled or have a long-term health condition, and you require any reasonable adjustments for your application with us, please let us know by contacting recruitment(at)africandevelopmentchoices(dot)org.

Equal Aqua is seeking a Trustee with significant fundraising expertise to provide strategic leadership and hands-on support to drive substantial income growth as the organisation scales towards a seven-figure annual income. The role involves actively leveraging networks to open doors to major donors, corporate partners and grant-makers, initiating high-value funding conversations and developing new income streams. The Trustee will help shape and oversee the organisation’s long-term fundraising strategy, support the cultivation and conversion of major funding opportunities, mentor the fundraising team and strengthen proposals and donor engagement. Acting as an ambassador for the organisation, they will also help raise Equal Aqua’s profile within influential networks while ensuring strong governance, accountability and performance through the Board and Fundraising Committee. The ideal candidate will bring senior-level fundraising experience, strong sector knowledge in areas such as WASH, climate or international development, and a network capable of unlocking significant new funding opportunities.

Equal Aqua is a registered Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) in the UK; Equal Aqua Uganda is a registered Community Based Organisation (CBO) in Uganda (‘EAU’ refers to both). Both operate equally and in unison. The purpose of EAU is to enable communities in Uganda to have access to safe and sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) facilities. EAU supports schools and communities facing the greatest WASH inequalities by providing water tanks and filters, running classes and workshops, and empowering young people to be WASH change makers in their community. The current Board of Trustees, consisting of 5 members based in UK and Uganda, provides guidance to the volunteer EAU management team as well as supporting the implementing volunteers based in UK, Uganda and other countries.

The objectives of EAU are, in Uganda, to:

1. To improve access to safe and sustainable WASH for those facing the greatest inequalities in Uganda

2. To strengthen the participation of local communities in WASH, in particular women and girls, and displaced peoples

3. To take action to protect the natural environment, reduce pollution and tackle climate change

The role of trustees is:

1. Sculpt and maintain EAU’s vision, mission, objectives and values.

2. Act as ‘critical friends’ in the development of EAU’s policy, programming and planning.

3. Actively champion EAU externally, opening doors to people and organisations that can support our cause, fostering awareness and engagement in the UK, Uganda and internationally.

4. Support in particular with income generation activities, advising and supporting delivery of major campaigns and helping to build EAU’s donor and partner base.

5. Establish and maintain systems for reporting and monitoring.

6. Ensure that the financial affairs of the organisation are conducted properly and are accurately reported.

7. Manage risk and ensure compliance and accountability with the governing document (EAU Constitution), external regulators and the law (UK and Uganda).

8. Safeguard EAU’s assets – both physical assets, including property, and intangible ones, such as its reputation.

Ensure EAU has the appropriate structure and resources to deliver the above.

Trustee Responsibilities:

1. To attend and contribute to EAU Board of Trustee meetings, held at least on a quarterly basis. To work with EAU management to set an agenda in advance of this meeting.

2. Currently, Trustees will hold the position for a maximum of 3 years. This length of trusteeship will be reviewed with the aim of staggering Trustee terms to ensure a smooth transition between board members.

3. To support the recruitment of additional trustees, from diverse backgrounds and providing a range of expertise.

4. To offer personal expertise and skills in select areas for the benefit of EAU. This may include legal, management, practical, fundraising, marketing or other relevant areas.

5. To offer advice and feedback on EAU’s main fundraising programmes, e.g. events and grant applications.

Additional Responsibilities of Trustee with fundraising expertise

To provide strategic leadership and hands-on support to drive significant and sustainable income growth for Equal Aqua, with the ambition of building towards a seven-figure annual income.

Key Responsibilities

1. Strategic Fundraising Leadership
   Provide Board-level oversight and strategic direction for the development and execution of an ambitious, multi-year fundraising strategy aligned with EAU’s growth plans, ensuring clear pathways to seven-figure annual income.
2. Active Income Generation & Network Mobilisation
   Proactively generate income by leveraging personal and professional networks to:
   • Open doors to high-value donors, grant-makers, corporates and philanthropic partners
   • Introduce EAU to influential individuals and decision-makers
   • Initiate and nurture strategic funding conversations
   • Identify and pursue new income streams and partnership opportunities

This role requires active relationship-building and direct contribution to income growth, not solely advisory input.

1. Pipeline Development & High-Value Fundraising
   Support the identification, cultivation and conversion of major funding opportunities, including trusts and foundations, corporate partnerships and major donors. Where appropriate, personally lead or co-lead high-value approaches.
2. Committee Leadership & Support
   Provide experienced guidance to the Fundraising Committee and fundraising volunteers, strengthening capability, confidence and performance across the team.
3. Hands-On Mentorship & Quality Assurance
   Offer practical, hands-on support to fundraising volunteers, including:
   • Reviewing and strengthening proposals and pitch materials
   • Advising on donor strategy and positioning
   • Supporting preparation for high-stakes meetings and presentations
4. Visibility & Advocacy
   Act as an ambassador for EAU, raising the organisation’s profile in relevant networks, events and forums, and positioning EAU as a credible, high-impact partner.
5. Governance & Accountability
   Attend quarterly Fundraising Committee meetings (one of EAU’s management committees) and relevant Board meetings, ensuring clear income targets, performance monitoring and accountability for results.

Desired Background and expertise of Trustee with Fundraising expertise.

 Senior Fundraising Experience

• A substantial track record (ideally 5+ years) in charity fundraising, with experience operating at a strategic level. This should include demonstrable success in securing significant income from one or more of the following: trusts and foundations, major donors, corporate partnerships, institutional funders or high-net-worth individuals. Experience supporting organisations through periods of income growth or scale-up is highly desirable. International development experience is strongly preferred.

• Sector-Relevant Knowledge
  Strong understanding of fundraising dynamics and donor priorities within one or more of Equal Aqua’s core thematic areas, including:
  • WASH (Water, Sanitation & Hygiene)
  • Climate and environmental sustainability
  • Menstrual health and gender equality
  • Rural enterprise and livelihoods
  • International development

Familiarity with the funding landscape in these sectors – including trends, key funders and partnership models – would be a significant advantage.

• Network & Influence
  An established professional network that can be activated in support of Equal Aqua’s growth ambitions, with the credibility and confidence to engage senior decision-makers and prospective funders.

• Strategic & Commercial Acumen
  The ability to think entrepreneurially about income generation, identify new revenue opportunities, and contribute to building a diversified and resilient funding portfolio.

Public Affairs Work Experience

Are you interested in public affairs and passionate about supporting children and young people with speech, language and communication challenges? Speech and Language UK is offering an exciting 3-week volunteer work experience placement from 15 June to 3 July 2026

Role Overview:

The successful applicant will play a key role in supporting the Public Affairs team with a committee event in Westminster on 22 June 2026. You’ll be involved in the full event lifecycle, from preparation to delivery and follow-up reporting.

This is a hybrid role, requiring:

• 4 days per week in our London office (09:00–15:00)
• Remote working on Fridays

How will you contribute to our cause?

• Support the Public Affairs team with event preparation, helping ensure a high-quality and impactful event
• Assist with the smooth logistical running of the Westminster committee event
• Contribute on the day by supporting delivery and engaging professionally with stakeholders
• Produce a clear, well-structured report to share key outcomes and support ongoing advocacy work

What we are looking for:

• Strong written communication skills
• Confidence in supporting events in a professional environment
• Ability to work both independently and as part of a small team
• An interest in public affairs and/or supporting children and young people with communication needs

You don’t need previous experience - just enthusiasm and a willingness to learn.

About Us:

We are Speech and Language UK – we want every child to face the future with confidence. For 2 million children in the UK, learning to talk and understand words feel like an impossible hurdle. Without the right help, this can destroy their world. They feel disconnected from their family. Unable to make friends. Unfairly punished for not following instructions they don’t understand. What does the future hold for them?

Why Us?

Speech and Language UK is dedicated to creating an inclusive environment for children and young people with speech and language challenges. If you’re ready to make a difference in a supportive, mission-driven environment, we’d love to hear from you.

What can you gain from this work experience?

• Hands-on experience working in a Public Affairs team within a national charity
• Insight into how events are planned and delivered, including a Westminster-based committee event
• Experience of working in both an office and remote (hybrid) environment
• A better understanding of how organisations influence policy and advocate for children and young people with communication needs
• The chance to build confidence, develop workplace skills, and strengthen your CV

Practical considerations and time commitment:

This work experience runs for three weeks, from 15 June to 3 July and you will be expected to attend 4 days per week in our London office (09:00–15:00) with Fridays working remotely.

You must be available to attend a Westminster-based committee event on 22 June 2026.

This is an unpaid work experience opportunity, but reasonable travel expenses will be covered and a small lunch stipend will be provided

You will receive a full induction and ongoing support from your named contact.

How to Apply:

Please submit your up-to-date CV and a supporting statement of no more than two pages, addressing how you meet the criteria outlined in this advert

For any queries about this work experience please contact Lucy Lee, Policy and Public Affairs Assistant (please contact us for email details)

Closing date for applications: Wednesday, 27 May 2026 at 9am, with interviews being held via Teams w/c 1st June 2026

Accessibility Support:

We want you to have every opportunity to demonstrate your skills, ability, and potential. Please contact us if you require any assistance or adjustments so that we can make the application process work for you. Please contact our People Team and we will be happy to assist you.

We are Disability Confident Committed under the Disability Confident Scheme.

This is an unpaid voluntary work experience opportunity designed for students who want to gain practical experience, develop professional skills, and contribute to work supporting families. This is not an employed role.