Finance professional community

Balancing budgets has never been more difficult – or more important. While resources are constrained, the demand placed on trusts and the work they do for their communities continues to grow. 

Our work to build excellence across strong financial management is a challenge, and one we will have to take on collectively. It is incumbent upon us to work together and find innovative ways of building capacity, driving improvement, and delivering support for the families we serve. 

Our community brings together the finance experts leading our trusts to share knowledge, develop practice, and offer supportive challenge as we work together to ensure excellence across the sector in the most challenging of fiscal environments, and explore long-term policy reform that will ensure state education is adequately funded by the state.

We aim to provide support and development opportunities, through a blend of expert input on key practice challenges, facilitated discussion, and networking.

The community offers a safe and supportive environment in which to develop your understanding of some of the key challenges related to financial management in trusts, through:

• Termly online community meetings featuring expert voices
• Topical webinars on emerging issues
• Our community site, which connects you with trust leaders across the country through a dedicated website and mobile apps
• Community resources and blogs from our members and partners
• Priority access to our annual in-person CST Finance and Operations Conference

Our professional communities are an integral part of CST membership, and taking part is open to all staff and governance volunteers of member trusts.