The accidental incorporation

or 'do we need organisational doulas?'

Shared Assets was never meant to be an organisation. When Ben Metz and I set up the Waterways Project, which eventually evolved into Shared Assets, it was quite deliberately a ‘project’. We were unincorporated and the funding for the project was handled by CIVA (the Centre for Innovation in Voluntary Action) so we didn’t need a company, or a bank account, or payroll.

Ben and I both had other jobs and we had no desire to set up an organisation. Neither of us wanted the responsibility for one thing, and we both bore too many scars from our previous experience of running, managing, or just working in organisations. We knew them to be unhealthy places. We wanted to dodge that bullet. 

The Waterways Project was focussed on the potential for community ownership and management of the UK’s canals. As the work developed however it became clear that the issue, and the opportunity, was much bigger than 2000 miles of inland waterways. It was 2011 and the UK had a new Conservative-led coalition government, a new creed of public sector austerity, and a new policy agenda of ‘localism’ and ‘community rights’. Everything was being sold off, from public libraries to the nation’s forests, and whilst the state was in retreat these were assets with little prospect of turning significant profits so the private sector had no or little interest in maintaining them. New community led models were needed. 

At a meeting held in a repurposed disused Subway sandwich shop in London’s Exmouth Market we held a meeting with a number of people working on these issues as part of popSE!, a one-week-only pop-up social enterprise think tank. The meeting identified a need for someone to work on these issues in relation to land based assets - parks, woodlands, farms etc - in particular. The scale was large, the timescales long. We would need resources, money, staff. We would need an organisation! As we sat in a circle in these unlikely surroundings the idea of Shared Assets arose from our collective thoughts and flickered into life. 

It was the first time that I had had to consider the strange metaphysics of creating an organisation from an idea. 

If you’ve set up, or supported the set up of an organisation what are the questions you wished you been asked or had the answers to? 

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It became immediately apparent that as an organisation ‘Shared Assets’ had more authority than I did as an individual, no matter how great my ideas, skills or opinions may have been. And yet Shared Assets relied for its credibility on the experience, knowledge, contacts and skills that Ben and I brought to it. We were suddenly in a strange dance where the ‘self’ of the organisation was both dependent on, and bigger than, any of the selves who were conjuring it into existence.

As we sought to recruit others to join us as founders we also had to face up to issues of power and control. We set the organisation up as a company limited by guarantee partly because this was the simplest and most flexible legal structure for our purposes, but also because it allowed us to be Directors as well as paid staff. We knew we didn’t want to give up control entirely to a board of trustees as we would have to have done if we established ourselves as a charity. 

So, we knew we wanted to retain some control but we knew we needed others to join as Directors, partly to bring their own experience, knowledge, contacts and skills, and partly to ensure our credibility with potential funders. We chose people we respected, trusted and thought we could work with. Even then, when I went to visit the person we had asked to be our Chair so that he could sign the paperwork, he asked me straight out, “why are you giving up control of your idea to a bunch of other people like this?”.

And so we took another step in the dance, one where the idea was suddenly being animated by other people, not just the two of us who had brought it into consciousness, and it was explicit that we were both acting collectively and had our own individual interests, and that these might come into conflict. 

In the end four of us signed the papers creating the legal personhood of Shared Assets. We were soon joined by a fifth board member, and a few months later, once we had secured funding, I started to be paid as an Executive Director and Kate joined as our first bona fide member of staff. 

During this period Shared Assets developed from a project, into an idea, into a legal person, into an employer, and in doing so it was identified at different times with myself, Ben, our co-founders, and then more firmly with myself and Kate working together. 

Over time it has felt variously like an extension of my self, and conversely like I was representing it. Like any organisation it has seen staff and board members come and go. It has developed an identity and purpose over time that is more plural and a reflection of the priorities, value and politics of those who have become part of it, and is at the same time quite its own, separate from those of any one individual.

More recently as Kate has left the staff team, and as I contemplate my own transition out of the organisation after 12 years, this weird two way transference between the self and the organisation is coming to the fore once again. What is Shared Assets when the founders are all gone, and who are we when we are no longer representatives or embodiments of Shared Assets?

It feels like we need incorporation doulas to tend to these tricky metaphysical matters of corporate birth and the transference of energy and spirit between the legal person of the corporation and the corporeal body of the individual. But in fact these are questions that are rarely addressed, and if they are only in passing or obliquely: “why are you giving up control of your idea to a bunch of other people like this?”.

What if we to ask other other questions: “to what extent is this organisation a projection of your self, and visa versa?”, “how will you feel when it changes and becomes a separate entity from you?”, “how much is your identity or your authority wrapped up in what you do or who you do it for?”, “how much of yourself is welcome at work, and when isn’t it?”.

These are the questions I’m looking forward to exploring with our guests as we develop the podcast, and which we’d love you to share you thoughts about using our new voice message feature. Drop us a voicenote!