Through our Volunteer Centre, we regularly meet people who are interested in giving something back but have never considered becoming a trustee.

I first became a trustee more than 20 years ago, in my 30s, which at the time was considered quite young for the role. Since then I have been a trustee of a wide range of organisations, from small local charities through to national ones. I spent five or six years as Vice Chair of a national organisation and ten years as Chair of Governors at a primary school. Today I am a trustee of VSSN, the Voluntary Sector Studies Network.

This week, around 160 people came together at our Communities 1st conference in St Albans. The room included charities, faith leaders, volunteers, public services, community groups and local organisations. One of the main discussions explored what holds communities together in unsettled times. It was thoughtful, honest and, at points, difficult. 

There was real value in bringing people with different experiences into the same room. But once the conference was over, I found myself thinking about a different question: who was missing?

I have spent most of my working life moving between the NHS, local government and the voluntary sector, and the thing that has stayed with me is the distance between how policy describes people's lives and how those lives are actually lived. Nowhere is that gap clearer at the moment than in the way we talk about getting older.

I have spent most of my working life around health and social care, volunteering, local government and the slow business of getting different parts of a place to pull together. After enough years of that, you notice a pattern in how we talk about what comes next. We are very good at describing what is hard. We produce delivery plans, targets and development programmes, and account in detail for what is broken or unaffordable. We are far less good at offering people a picture of what could be different, and a reason to be part of building it.