Organisation

Freegle has been formed as a collective of groups. We are still very new in terms of our national organisational structure as we are building ourselves 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.

Who manages it?

We have together elected a team of 9 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.
These are our current task lists:

Volunteer Task List
Structure Working Group
Growth Working Group
Tech Working Group

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 charity. Have a look at the page Charitable Status for some Q & A about this

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

Do we have rules?

There have been a polls to 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]

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