Many community led projects start with friends or neighbours seeing a need or opportunity and then making it happen. Often there is no level of organisation; it’s just people with a shared idea getting on with it. Each person leans into their own skills, decisions are made collectively and one way or another everyone (mostly) has a good time.  But what happens when things scale up?

Some projects are one-offs and never get repeated. But others reveal real value or unmet need in a community and from that comes a vision to keep the project going. The informal collective approach can sustain ongoing activity to an extent but eventually the outside world starts making demands. 

When things go adrift

Money is often the start of things changing. Handling cash, donations, sales etc needs a bank account and that in turn requires names, signatures and the rules of an association. Obtaining grants needs something more formal; a charity or a CIC perhaps. And with that comes a statement of the objects of the group, the election of officers and policies on safeguarding, health & safety and so on. Paying someone for their labour brings in more complexity. At the very least some form of insurance will be needed, even for volunteers, but if someone is undertaking regular paid work are they casual freelancers or are they employees? With employees the complexity increases again, with issues around the liabilities of the trustees / directors plus HR policies and practice.  If property is involved, who is the occupier, the licencee or the lessee? And if there are service delivery contracts, what are the risks and contingencies?

Quite quickly a project can evolve from a group of mates occasionally meeting to have ideas in a pub or café to something that has agendas, minutes, sub-committees and an increasingly opaque hierarchy. And then the people change. Early founders disappear (“It’s not fun like it used to be”), others grumble (“I don’t know where all that money goes”) and a new cohort of ambitious people with management experience and skills come to the fore.

What happened?

Eventually the project is no longer recognisable to those who were there at the beginning.  It might be doing great things, have an amazing social media profile, be lauded at conferences. But somehow it has parted company with the community that dreamed a dream of doing something for themselves.

So the big question is: How does a community inspired project evolve, grow and develop but stay true to its origins?