Our charity is young (started this year) and volunteer-led, but we really feel we want and need a person whose responsibilities would be more than enough for a full time role. We obviously doubt that we'll find someone to take this on as a volunteer, so how do we work out what kind of role we should try to find another volunteer for?

Is it common to have a list of priorities to give the volunteer and agree with them what they take on?

One of the priorities is to help run the fundraising and part of the funding would be to employ some staff. We envisage the fundraising being mostly via grants, so the fundraising work would be doing grant applications. Yet for grant applications, my experience is that the budget needs to be well defined, in other words we would have to propose budgets that included salaries for the volunteer and myself included to be honest if this is going to be sustainable.

So far we have only won small amounts of funding. However I lose my resolve at the enormity of the challenge with grant applications, which includes guiding the trustees on what the best options are and trying to be honest about the workload I can sustain long term.

Has anyone here successfully navigated this stage of a charity's development?