Organisation

Freegle has been formed as a collective of groups. We are building our national organisational structure democratically (and all that consultation can take a long time!).

What is Freegle?

Freegle is all the Owners, Moderators and Volunteers of affiliated groups coming together as equal members 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.

Freegle Ltd - Freegle Ltd Membership

Who manages it?

We have together elected a team of 9 Freegle Reps to oversee the centralised work of Freegle, along with Returning Officers and Ombudsmen to assist our democratic processes.

Can I get involved?

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

Teams are where tasks that have been identified collectively as needing doing to maintain a central organisation are carried out.
Click to see our list of current Task Lists.

And of course we have general groups - Freegle UK Central and Freegle Rock 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?

We are an unincorporated association - http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/ctmanual/CTM41305.htm - so we are not a legal entity, but we do have a mutually agreed structure.

We have adopted a Constitution which outlines the structure and decision making processes we have mutually agreed to follow.

We will hold an Annual General Meeting each year as agreed in our Constitution.

One area under consideration is whether we should consider becoming a registered charity. Have a look at the page Charitable Status for some Q & A about this. Freegle has registered with the HMRC as charitable.

We have adopted a Financial Management and Controls document to enable the opening of a bank account.

Currently (2014) we are in the process of changing to a more formal structure. Freegle Structural Change gives some information about this.

Do we have rules?

There have been polls and discussions to adopt a variety of other 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 [1]

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 [[2]]. 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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