What Does The Charity Steward Do?

What Does The Charity Steward Do?

The Charity Steward deals with many things within a Lodge. Typically it is about how specifically their Lodge interacts with charities and charitable requests. Some of what this includes is listed below but there is a lot to this role:

Fundraising: The Charity is primarily supported by members making regular donations as well as collections at our meetings. A useful bonus is added when Gift Aid from HMRC can be added. Also, if the Lodge does run an event that make a profit this can be added to our charitable funds.

Giving To Charity: At Perfect Friendship we have our own Registered Charity (Registered Number 801585) which means that we need to comply with the rules of running a Registered Charity. During our ‘Festival 2029’ we aim to support the Suffolk Provincial efforts to raise money for the Masonic Charitable Foundation but outside of a Festival we can support local Charities as can be seen from our Charity section on the website.

Financial Management: This is ensuring our figures match. It’s specifically different to the Treasurers role who follows the numbers themselves and manages our Lodge/group funds but the Charity Steward has to ensure we honour the commitments we made and manage our charitable giving.

Education & Awareness: New Masons take time to get up to speed with how we generate funds and what how this is done. Thus, the Charity Steward is to make sure that this is communicated effectively across all levels of our membership. Ensuring everyone know who we are supporting and more importantly why.

Reporting: The Charity Steward is expected to report on the work completed back to Lodge but also to the Province of Suffolk as well as relevant reporting to the Charity Commission.

Collaboration: This role can have a lot of crossover to it and it can even scale to merge with other Lodges and other Charity Stewards. So, good interpersonal skills are as vital as is great attention to detail.

Compliance: The work of the Charity Steward requires you to be transparent with all your undertakings.

The Charity Steward is a high-profile role within any lodge, reporting back to our members at every meeting on what is happening in our bid to help worthy causes. So, it requires quite an amount of time but they do derive a great amount of satisfaction from holding this post and many undertake it for a long time.

This role is typically a 5-year appointment and it covers many component parts. It can also be a longer appointment if required, with many holding post for 10-years or more.

If a Lodge was thought of as akin to a business then the Charity Steward would be its Corporate Social Responsibility Director/Manager. They are responsible for the assistance we provide to people outside of Freemasonry in their time of need. The Almoner helps Freemasons, the Charity Steward helps Charities which are nothing to do with Freemason’s Lodges.