The Lodge Trustees: Holding the Building, the Money, and the Long View

Overview

Lodge Trustees are responsible for the lodge's real property and long-term assets, usually as fiduciaries with legal duties. This guide covers how the office varies by jurisdiction, what to secure before accepting, managing the building and the endowment, two-signature controls, reporting to the lodge, and a quarter-by-quarter first year.

The Trustees are the office where jurisdictional differences matter most, and this guide starts there: temple associations versus incorporated lodges, Grand Lodge code versus bylaws, and the documents to locate before anything else. It then covers the fiduciary standard, building an asset list, the building itself (deeds, insurance, condition, reserves, tenants), the long-term money (prudent investment, restricted funds, dual signatures), and the line between what Trustees may decide and what belongs to the lodge or Grand Lodge. A first-year plan sequences the work by quarter. It closes with the difficult cases every long-serving Trustee meets: the building the lodge can't afford, the Brother who wants to borrow from the endowment, the disputed bequest, and the Trustee who stopped attending.