Organisation

Freegle has been formed as a collective of groups. We have built our national organisational structure democratically (and all that consultation took a long time!).

What is Freegle?

Freegle is at heart all the Owners, Moderators and Volunteers of affiliated groups coming together to form a mutually supportive organisation. If you are working with a Freegle group, you are a part of Freegle and are known as a Freegle Volunteer.

If you wish to participate fully in national decisions and support the organisation, Freegle Ltd Membership is an option for all Volunteers. As we have evolved into a Registered Society, there is the requirement to pay for that (hey, though, it is only a £1 for life!) but it does allow you to show your full support and vote on important issues as a Freegle Member.

Who manages it?

There are annual elections for the Freegle Board. The Board Directors are also Trustees of Freegle and responsible for strategic direction and management of Freegle Ltd. (see full remit at Board Role and Remit) The Board is accountable to the Members of Freegle.

We have no paid staff, but there are opportunities for Contracted Roles from time to time.

Can I get involved?

The Working Groups are where discussions take place to move ourselves forward in a positive way to keep more items out of landfill, support each other and sustain our present success.

Freegle Teams are where tasks that have been identified collectively as needing doing to maintain a central organisation are carried out.

Click to see the list of current Task Lists.

And of course we have general groups – Freegle Central Group and Freegle Cafe – where more general issues are raised and chatted about.

All the above are open to all Volunteers involved in Freegle.

Do we have a formal structure?

Yes!

We started as an unincorporated association - http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/ctmanual/CTM41305.htm - so were not a legal entity, but we did have a mutually agreed structure, with a Constitution which outlined the structure and decision making processes we mutually agreed to follow as Freegle UK. Freegle UK registered with the HMRC [1] as charitable and opened a bank account.

In 2014 we decided to change to a more formal structure, Freegle Structural Change lists the processes and decisions undertaken. We became an IPS, Freegle Ltd with Rules, which now is regarded as a Registered Society.

If you get queries about this, there is a sample message here that might help - Are you a Charity?

Do we have rules?

Other than the formal Rules we have adopted as part of bring a Registered Society, there have been polls and discussions to adopt a variety of other supporting policies and procedures. All of these are listed on this wiki under the category category:Policies, Procedures, Remits

The question of trademarking the name Freegle is also a recurring topic of discussion. An interesting article to read about other's experiences on this can be found at [2]

Not a rule as such, but we do care about each other. We have a Freegle Equality and Diversity Policy that we have agreed to all work to.

How are we funded?

We have costs, that is the reality of running things online. Although we all offer our time voluntarily, running the central website, offering extra IT goodies and getting the Freegle name recognised at a national level does incur expenses.

At the moment we run on very little, our accounts can be found here [[3]]. We have set up a variety of ways that people can donate towards our costs, full explanations of these can be found at Donations for Freegle.

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