Constitution review update – August 25

The Dons Trust board is pleased to announce some changes to the constitutional review process that have been agreed to drive the process forward in the next few weeks.

New board member James Ledward will now be leading this on behalf of the DTB. We have asked Dave Boyle to work with James to get a draft constitution ready for consideration in October.

James brings professional governance experience from his time at Deloitte working in the Governance, Risk and Compliance team, and in a voluntary capacity, when in 2020 he carried out a full review of his rugby club’s constitution.

Dave is a former CEO of Supporters Direct, the government-backed organisation which promoted supporters’ trusts. Dave was our caseworker at Supporters Direct when the Trust was founded, where he worked with Dons fans to agree the current constitution in 2002, and later drafted the restricted actions amendments.He’s a founder member of the Trust and now works as a consultant to co-operatives and community businesses. He’s a member of Co-operatives UK’s Expert Governance Panel which monitors and reports on best practice across the co-operative and mutual sectors and is a director of Co-operatives UK. He also chairs their Co-operatives UK Governance Sub-Committee.

Dave and James will work with the secretarial team and the members of the constitutional review group to get a draft in place by October.

Dave said “I’ve seen the work done by the existing review group, and they’ve done a really great job of breaking the back of the process and chewed over lots of the key issues. My job is to help translate their comments on the existing constitution into the new version – which will be based on the Football Supporters’ Association’s new template – and then work with them to get all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed”.