A practical workforce wellbeing pack that lets an HR Director or Head of People hand a senior leadership team a sector-specific recap of trustee duties under the Charity Governance Code, the realities of grant-funded employment, and what your current people practice already covers. Four fields, print-ready summary, share it with your CEO.
The UK third sector employs roughly 950,000 people across charities, voluntary organisations, social enterprises, and community-interest companies, with more than a million regular volunteers alongside them. NCVO's UK Civil Society Almanac has for several years now documented the sector's chronic retention problem — high vacancy rates, heavy reliance on short-term grant-funded roles, and pay that rarely reflects the depth of the work.
This pack is for HR Directors, Heads of People, and senior leadership teams in small-to-medium charities and large national charities alike — anyone who needs a single, shareable file that summarises what an employer can reasonably be expected to do for the wellbeing of a frontline third-sector employee, and what the trustee-side duties under the Charity Governance Code already require.
Trustee duty 5 of the Charity Governance Code (Integrity) and the supplementary NCVO/ACEVO people-focused guidance — what trustees are already accountable for on staff wellbeing, and what your HR team can deliver against that accountability.
How the realities of grant-funded employment — short-term contracts, end-of-grant anxiety, project-renewal stress — translate into sector-specific workforce risk, and what an employer can document to mitigate it.
Charity-sector implications — frontline delivery roles, hybrid volunteer and paid teams, lived-experience employment, and the rotation between commissioned service contracts.
Whatever you currently offer is reflected back to you in the summary, alongside a checklist of the practical questions your leadership team should be able to answer for a frontline third-sector employee.
Direct links to the Charities Act 2011 and Charity Commission CC3 guidance, the Charity Governance Code, the NCVO UK Civil Society Almanac, and the ACEVO senior-pay and HR-practice notes.
Third-sector employers sit under a board-level duty of care that is wider, in spirit, than the statutory baseline in the for-profit world — and the workforce cannot always tell the difference when a grant cycle ends or a service-user crisis lands. The first step is naming what an employer can already do; the second is having a people-team process that turns that into routine.
The summary is generated in your browser as a self-contained HTML file you can print, save as PDF, or email to your CEO and trustee board. NurtureArc also captures the waitlist signup so we can let you know when sector-specific team-assessment slots open for charities and voluntary-sector organisations.