Governance notes on membership, structures and the role of the company Articles

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Membership

• Who are members now? There are just six members at the moment, these are the directors.
• How did this come about? At the AGM it was decided to go ahead with forming a CIC. Several ideas about membership were discussed, but agreement was not reached. It was decided to go ahead with just the directors being members and investigate the membership options further. It was decided not to delay creating the CIC as this was needed for funding applications and to provide limited liability.
• What issues have been raised about membership?
  • that all people living in the five wards defined as Brixton should automatically be members
  • that people will not be so free to join in if they have to sign up as members
  • a question: would we have to have a payment for someone to be a member?
  • people might feel more that they belonged if they had to sign up and pay a fee
  • that we could raise money by giving people the option to give different amounts, yearly or monthly
  • we could have two categories of members: active members and ‘friends’, or, maybe, three categories and include groups and organizations
  • that we have a problem to implement membership before we have finalized the new website as there needs to be a new database and online signup (we are moving the main site and the wiki to a single new WordPress site)
• What are the main two groups that could become members?
  1. All people who supported the aims of TTB and paid a small subscription (this needs confirming, it may be possible for this to be zero). This is referred to as individual, or direct membership.
     • Effectively individuals become members of the TTB CIC, on a one person one vote basis.
     • Our membership would therefore be all those individuals – some of whom may or may not be involved with working groups.
     • The members decide what happens strategically, with the Board doing the day to day management/planning.
  2. Just the representatives of the working groups. This is referred to as group or federal membership.
     • Membership of the TTB CIC comprises of each of the working groups, rather than individuals.
     • Each group would have equal weight in terms of voting.
     • The members decide what happens strategically, with the Board doing the day to day management/planning.

Different Structures and Ways of Running Organizations

As a result of discussions about how the new CIC would operate, experience in dealing with making decisions in groups within TTB and in other organizations, people have become interested in exploring different structures and ways of working.

People have given examples of where the classic setup with members and voting has been inadequate by being adversarial and resulting in winners and losers.

The two main things explored and discussed have been:

• Consensus decision making. This refers not just to the final point of the decision, where everyone is in agreement (or, at least, not vetoing). It is a way of facilitating a meeting to help all voices to be heard and work towards combining views by carefully working through them.
• Sociocracy – we had a workshop on this, but opinion is divided on how practical it is. It appears at this stage to be not immediately implementable.

Best practice and the role of the articles

Two of the Food and Growing Group coordinators attended a course entitled ‘Members, meetings and decision-making’ run by Co-operatives UK. This was a workshop to explore strategies for an engaged membership, effective meetings and decision making in a community food enterprise.

This covers a lot of relevant issues. It may be useful to refer to. Important points raised:

• What members can do
• Who can be a member?
• Traditional meeting structure and what is wrong with it
• Less tradition meeting styles
• Consensus decision-making and who uses it
• What you need for consensus
• Importance of process being clear – defined in the articles, how to hold meetings, membership etc

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