Thank you so much for your interest in volunteering your time at the Festival of Trusteeship. The deadline to return this form is Sunday 4^th October 2026.

The Festival is a week-long online series of events for anyone who wants to become a trustee, and for committed trustees who want to keep learning and developing. The Festival is hosted by Eastside People and is made up of 18 events across the week of 9^th November 2026 (Trustees’ Week). You can read more about the Festival here.

This form is for people to volunteer their time to contribute to a Festival session. We are looking for a mix of panellists, expert speakers, researchers and people with relevant case studies or experiences to share. The format varies by session and is marked below. We will give selected speakers more information about the format and what we need from them in advance.

Please make sure that you are available for the event before you offer. You would need to log on 15 minutes before the start time stated in the agenda below.

Most of our volunteers will be serving trustees, but this year we are also looking for expert speakers, researchers and people with relevant case studies or professional experience.

Some of the sessions are panel discussions. These are conversational and there are usually no speeches or presentations. You would be sent questions in advance to think about your answers. Panellists do not need to be seasoned speakers – we get wonderful feedback that panels of trustees sharing their real-life experiences are incredibly helpful for Festival attendees.

We want our sessions to include people with different lengths and types of trustee experience, from different sizes of charities, with different personal and work backgrounds, based in different locations in the UK. It is this mix which makes discussion so valuable. Since most trustees are trustees of smaller charities, it follows that many of our volunteer contributors will also be serving smaller organisations.

We are lucky enough to expect to get more volunteer offers than we can use. Please don’t let this stop you volunteering! A wide range of offers means that we can put together events which reflect the diversity of the charity sector and the trustee experience.

We have an inclusion fund for panellists who couldn’t otherwise volunteer their time. This is intended to remove barriers to serving as a volunteer speaker. You can indicate below if you would like to apply for a payment from the fund. We don’t use this information in our selection of volunteers and we don’t ask why you need the payment.

If you are the sole speaker of a session or if your session involves more preparation than others, we will discuss potential payment separately.

Please note that all sessions are recorded to increase the reach of the Festival and published on Eastside People's website and YouTube channel.

Thank you so much for your support for the Festival of Trusteeship.

Please don’t provide contact details. If we think we have a potential speaker space for them we will contact you to ask for an introduction (if we don’t already have their details). Please still suggest people you don’t know personally, we can make a direct approach.