Freegle Affiliation Policy

This Policy was adopted by the Board at their meeting of 29th October 2014.

The Board delegates responsibility to the Group Affiliation Team (GAT) to handle applications and implementation of procedures for new groups that wish to affiliate to Freegle.

Local Groups

• Applications are considered from individuals who wish to affiliate a group to Freegle and who agree to run their groups to the current Group Affiliation Requirements Policy. In order to comply with these requirements when considering approval GAT defines:
  • Core Area: Groups will not be approved by GAT in the future within that area (1).
  • Catchment Area: Individual group owners decide their own catchment areas. The catchment area is the geographic area within which a group accepts posts and members.
• Freegle as an organisation never sets up groups even to fill gaps. Where there are gaps in provision, however, Freegle can proactively encourage new groups to be set up in line with this policy.
• New groups should come from a local requirement for them. They are intended to be locally run but there are no owner residence rules.
• New groups will not be approved in a core area where there is an active (more than 10 posts per month) Freegle group.
• Current owners and moderators should not be limited to the number of groups that they run but in order to avoid empire building should recruit and train up local moderators with a view to handing ownership over to them.
• Freegle affiliated groups are not in competition with each other.

Note(1)

Freegle only affiliates one group per core area and it is highly recommended that an affiliated group operates only in that area. Freegle may approve a specialist group in the same area as a standard group.

Links:

• Group Affiliation Team - GAT
• Document Approval Policy
• Glossary
• Previous Freegle UK document - Group Affiliation Team Freegle Affiliation Policy