Today we’re announcing some upcoming changes at Impact Box.

Six years after starting the organisation our founder, Chris, is going to be leaving at the end of March.

As some of you will have experienced, for a founder-led organisation the founder leaving can be a big deal. So for the last few months we’ve been working hard as an organisation to develop a plan that ensures this can be a smooth process that ultimately strengthens the organisation and the work we do.

Above all we want to avoid any change or disruption to the service we offer our customers.

Our biggest asset has always been the team of talented and mission-focussed people we have at Impact Box. So rather than go down the route of recruiting a new CEO as a direct replacement we’ve decided to become a worker owned co-operative.

There are a number of great things about the co-operative model that makes it a good fit for what we do. Co-operatives are guided by a clear set of values and principles. This means we can enshrine our core mission - to provide impact led, transformative solutions to the social sector - and safeguard our organisational values long term. We also believe that giving our team more ownership over what we do will only help to grow our existing culture of openness, innovation and collaboration, and will increase the impact we are able to deliver.

We’re now sufficiently far through the process of forming a co-operative that we wanted to let all of our customers know about this development.

For administrative reasons the co-operative is going to be a new legal entity so there will be a few procedural things to work through with customers over the next couple of months. For example, we’ll be contacting support customers individually to discuss formally transferring support agreements to the co-operative. However, we are confident that some additional administrative paperwork will be all that there is in terms of any disruption.

The most important thing is that we are going to continue offering exactly the same services we do at the moment with the same team in place.

For Tent customers the product will be unaffected as Chris will be continuing to lead development and management of the Tent platform outside of the cooperative.

If you have any questions about this change and what it might mean for your organisation I’d be happy to arrange a call to discuss. Just send Chris an email to arrange it.