ICAEW member John Tennent can manage a crowd. Not a skill he honed as part of his ACA training, but as a volunteer steward at the tennis Championships at Wimbledon. “A relatively small group of us oversaw the queue – sometimes up to 18,000 people in a field every morning – thinking this could go badly wrong at any moment! What we learned was, if you have a clear simple system, for which there is no deviation, people will comply. If it’s all a bit ambiguous, people start making up their own rules.”

Over the course of 18 years volunteering at the Championships, Tennent ended up on the operations committee and managing radio communications. For the past five years, his job has been to steward the photographer’s area behind the umpire on Centre Court.

Learning new skills

“I learned skills that I would never have learned in my normal accounting life. You go home at the end of the day thinking, why do I do this? It’s because I work with great colleagues who also want to give and enjoy doing so. I’ve met numerous members of the public who I wouldn't have met in my normal life and I’m grateful to have had an incredibly rewarding time.” 

Tennent’s enthusiasm for volunteering is infectious as he shares the long list of trustee roles he has taken on over the past 40 years in parallel to his day job, often in an honorary treasurer capacity. His first role was at the age of 21 with a local home for the elderly. 

Since then, he also volunteered for adoption support charity PACT, children’s hospice Helen & Douglas House, the Air Ambulance Service (Vice Chair and Honorary Treasurer), London Marathon Foundation (Trustee and Chair of the finance committee), RSPCA (member of its Finance, Audit and Risk Committee) and the MedicAlert Foundation UK & Ireland (Honorary Treasurer).

Purposeful and useful

Tennent was also Honorary Treasurer for Samaritans during the pandemic. “I spent the pandemic in discussion with the network of branches to help them plan their finances through the difficulties. On a personal level, at a time when one felt rather hopeless, it allowed me to be purposeful and useful.”

For the past 12 years, Tennent has volunteered as a steward at Twickenham Stadium, managing a gangway alongside his youngest son and other volunteer stewards, who occasionally include a fireman, a non-religious celebrant, a funeral director, a pilot and a farmer. 

The diversity of people that Tennent has met along his volunteering journey is one of the joys of the experience, he says. “You meet people who are happy to give – and I don't mean money. They give their time, their interest, their generosity and their friendship – it’s just hugely uplifting to spend time with them.”

Similarly, seeing the positive impact of the charities makes it more than worthwhile. “We always try to get a patient along to the annual away day for the Air Ambulance Service. This year there was a young man who had been in a terrible car accident. He was in hospital for seven months and had to learn to speak and walk again. On the anniversary of the accident, he got married because he wanted a positive association with that date. I am no medic, but it is humbling to use my accounting skills to help the organisation that made this possible and saved his life.”

Plentiful opportunities for accountants

Given the shortage of charity treasurers, opportunities for ICAEW members to get involved as trustees are plentiful. “If you do it properly, you'll find that it’s the most rewarding role you will ever fulfill,” Tennent says. His advice is to cut your teeth on a small organisation that allows you to get your head around how it all works. “Some of the financial rules for charities can be quite onerous. There’s also a new Statement of Recommended Practice coming out this autumn, which a lot of small charities are really struggling with because they don’t have the accounting capability to apply it.”

ICAEW has produced a series of free online training modules for charity trustees covering responsibilities and the strategic and operational considerations of trustees. Meanwhile, for more experienced trustees, ICAEW provides a free two-part CPD webinar for members who volunteer as charity trustees.

As a trustee, your role hinges on governance rather than management, Tennent says. “The CEO and management are there to run the charity. Your job as a trustee is to ensure good governance, to make sure there are good processes and reporting that allows you to monitor what you've agreed, and ultimately there's a good use of donors’ money to fulfil the charitable purpose.”

Using finance skills for good

Kristina Kopic, ICAEW’s Head of Charity and Voluntary Sector, recommends volunteering to everyone who can spare a few hours to give back and make a difference. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to use your finance skills to benefit a cause you’re passionate about and build new networks,” she says. “Our website ICAEW Volunteers has helped many of our members find volunteering opportunities for over a decade.”

And taking on a role that gives you something different to your day job can be incredibly rewarding. “Think of something that will give you a different dimension,” says Tennent. “None of my paid jobs have ever required me to steer people around a field, but I've learned how to do it!” 

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