Why We're Building This as a CIC, Not a Charity

People ask us this a lot, usually gently, sometimes not so gently: if this is about community and land and people who've had a rough time of it, why aren't you a charity?

It's a fair question. Here's the honest answer.

The word "charity" does a lot of work in people's heads

Say "charity" and most people picture something specific: a board of trustees a long way from the ground floor, an annual report full of photos of smiling volunteers, a funding model that depends on convincing strangers your beneficiaries are sympathetic enough to deserve help this year. None of that is a criticism of charities — plenty of good ones exist, and plenty of good work gets done that way. It's just not the shape we're building.

We're setting Rooted Networks Ltd up as a Community Interest Company — a CIC. We're not there yet; it's a "working towards" rather than a "we are." But it's worth explaining why we're aiming at that structure specifically, because the structure isn't paperwork. It's a decision about who the land answers to.

What a CIC actually is

A CIC is a company — an ordinary limited company — with a lock built into it. That lock is called an asset lock, and it does one simple thing: it stops the company's assets, including any land it holds, from being sold off or distributed for private profit. If the company ever wound up, what's left has to go to another asset-locked organisation with a similar community purpose, not into anyone's pocket.

That's the part that matters most to us, because it's the same instinct behind everything else we're trying to do here. Land that's held for a community shouldn't be one bad decision, one change of leadership, or one tempting offer away from being sold out from under the people who depend on it. The Enclosure Acts happened because land that people relied on had no lock on it — it was someone's asset, and assets get sold. An asset lock is a small, boring, legally enforceable way of saying: not this time.

Why not a charity, then, if permanence is the goal?

Charities have locks too, in their own way — but they also come with a specific set of obligations and a specific relationship to the Charity Commission, funders, and a fairly narrow definition of "public benefit" that has to be argued and re-argued. A CIC answers to a different regulator, with a lighter, faster structure, but still has to file a Community Interest Statement and report every year on what it actually did for the community — not just what it intended to do.

Practically, that means a CIC can move like a normal business when it needs to: hold contracts, take on modest commercial activity to keep itself going, make quick decisions — while still being legally bound to plough benefit back into the community rather than into shareholders. For something like a network of small growing spaces, spread across different sites, at different stages, needing different things at different times, that flexibility isn't a nice-to-have. It's what makes it workable at all.

What this means for you, on the ground

If you're someone who might one day turn up to dig, none of this changes the plot in front of you. You don't need to know what a CIC is to pull a weed or plant a row of beans. But it does mean something for what happens to that plot ten or twenty years from now, long after any of us currently talking about it have moved on. The regulator can hold the structure to account independently of who happens to be running things day to day. The lock doesn't depend on trust in individuals — it depends on structure. That's deliberate.

It also means we're not asking anyone to believe in our good intentions forever. Good intentions run out or change hands. A structure that makes selling the land difficult, on paper, in law, doesn't run out. That's the whole point of choosing it over something looser.

Small, real, and legally boring on purpose

None of this is glamorous. Nobody joins a community farm because they love reading about company structures. But we'd rather be honest about the plumbing now than let people find out later that the thing they gave time and trust to had no lock on the door. Small and real beats large and managed — and part of being real is admitting that "community-owned" means nothing if there's no mechanism forcing it to stay that way.

We're not a charity. We're working towards being a CIC, because we think that's the structure that best matches what we're actually trying to do: hold land for people, permanently, without pretending we need to be a charity to prove we mean it.