What is a Charitable Community Benefit Society?
When our four founder members decided that it was worth pursuing our ambitions for generating electricity from renewable sources for the benefit of local people, we faced with deciding what sort of organisation best suited our purposes.
We conducted extensive research and considered a range of organisational structures from commercial company to full blown charity. The reasons we chose to be a Charitable Community Benefit Society were:
- it enabled us to formalise the redistribution of profits to local people in need through setting up a Community Benefit Fund
- we could sell the electricity we generated
- local people could invest in our enterprise through share issues
- charitable status afforded us exemption from certain taxes through registration with HMRC, and
- being “charitable” put us in a favourable position when applying for grants.
Because we are intending to trade we have the dual status of a charitable organisation and a limited company. We have a constitution and rules prescribed by Cooperative UK and we are registered with The Financial Conduct Authority to whom we submit an annual financial statement.
Under our rules we can recruit members (currently £1 membership fee) who must be over 16, approved by the Board and sign up to the charitable objectives of the organisation. We must hold an AGM at which directors are appointed to the Board and members make decisions.
If you would like to learn more or consider joining us then send a message to us via our contact page.
