I'm helping the chair of a local micro-charity review its governance and operations, and am hoping there might be people here who with useful experience or advice they could share. 

It's a CIO that owns and manages a local green space, and is developing it as a nature reserve (very successfully). Most of the seven trustees do a lot of site-based maintenance work themselves - and this is officially part of their role. So there's no separation between operations and governance, with the result that strategic / charity management type work tends to fall by the wayside as reactive site-based stuff takes up a lot of their time. There is also rather more enthusiasm for site-based work than admin and spreadsheets! 

Ideally operations and governance would be separated, but is this realistic for such a small organisation? It's great that they are happy to pull on their wellies and spend days mending fences and clearing paths, but I'm concerned that it doesn't offer a sustainable future for the charity as a charity. The obvious answer is to get volunteers to do more work on site but it seems volunteer recruitment hasn't been very successful in the past. Ditto getting in additional trustees.

Sorry for the rather vague wail, but any real-life insights, or pointers to useful resources on managing this kind of charity would be greatly appreciated!