I'm the founder of a small social enterprise offering training and mindfulness. Legal status is a 'sole trader', but this is a bit of an anomaly as we just cover our costs and/or plough any profit back into the business, offering reduced courses to public and third sector and reduced fees to any of our clients who are on a low income. It's always a dilemma for me to know whether to move to some form of charitable status - CIC would seem the obvious model, or to continue as we are with a firm control on what we do. Brooding on these issues brought me to this website - I'd love to pick up tips from you, especially if you have been in a similar position.
Hi Jeannie, The SCVO website is a very good resource for this. It contains pretty much everything you could need. It is worth really thinking through why you might want charitable status and a key part of this is considering whether your end users are paying customers or beneficiaries. Also, give some thought to what you want to achieve in the longer term... there may even be scope for two related enterprises! Hope this helps - good luck with it! M.
How is charitable status or CIC going to help? In my experience the hassle and expense of sorting it out, paying accountants etc may outweigh the benefits....?
I'm a trustee of a local sports charity (only recently set up so while a novice the info is pretty fresh!) and the main consideration I would have is over wage (assuming you take something) Fairly sure you would need to become an employee of the charity and, as such, could not have an active board member role. You would need to find whatever the minimum number of board members is for the quorum(?) and then hope they want to take the charity in the same direction you do. We got a lot of help from local council so I'd recommended learning a lot more before making a decision.
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