Skip to content
People in Commons:
People in Commons is a community enterprise, incorporated as a Community Interest Company, a type of company that is specifically designed to be mission focused and supportive of the wider community, not just their members.
Vision and mission
Our vision is to support individuals to engage with community activities more easily. This might be as simple as supporting someone to share their garden space and grow food for the community. Or it could be to reduce individual ownership and pool resources, enabling more people to access the things they need without having to buy duplicate.
Context
People in Commons are here as a result of the climate breakdown. We recognise that there is an overburden of consumption and we are working to develop community wealth, distribute resources and support new ways of working, thinking and being.
How we operate
People in Commons are a large membership CIC. This means that people can become involved in the decision making of what, where, when and how.
We are working to ensure that this type of governance becomes more common place, so that people can have a say in their local community activities, empowering communities to become more involved in how everything works for them.
We have developed our volunteer to ensure that all our members can easily access ways to be supported for being supportive! Below are a list of support packages that we offer for our volunteers:
DisCo Pantry:
We have set up ways to support of community to eat together, we become a buyers network! There are a number of ways that our members can do this, either, we shop locally at Seasons in Lewes and provide our membership details, or we use the see below, or the CIC bulk orders with Infinity foods, also soon to set up with Suma. Come and get involved!
Pleo account,
DisCo Gym membership:
Our membership package has started! We can now support all our members to access Wave Leisure centers as part of our membership offer.
If you are interested in accessing this as part of your membership, please get in touch with Dora, Moopy or James directly and they will go through the process with you.
DisCo Green ISP:
We have negotiated with Green ISP to be able to offer there services to our members as part of our drive to collaborate with not-for-profit entities. All members need to do is to select the package they would like, the ISP to set up from their Pleo account and then provide the People In Commons secret code, which of course you get when you become a member!
Pleo for DisCo cards:
We use Pleo to support all our members to access funds from the CIC. The CIC is a large membership organisation and each of the services our members require can be paid for through their Pleo account
We have been working with Pleo to develop an account management system that can support all our members when they volunteer for People In Commons. This ensures that our volunteers are well supported and able to access the resources they might need for them to continue with supporting the communities they are part of.
DisCo Car club:
Our car club model is still in progress. The bones of it look like this: members transfer their cars into People In Commons, The CIC takes out the insurance on these vehicles, which also covers the entire membership of the CIC, the members then coordinate about use of the vehicles. The original owner still keet the vehicel where it was always kept and they still use it as they always did, but they can easily enable their friends to use their vehicle, without having to worry about the insurance etc etc.
This works best on scale and the idea is that in theory, members can use all other vehicles but it is likely that people will just be able to use the vehicles of people they already know. Eventually this will begin a shift in the way that we access vehicles, we become the custodians of them and have to collaborate with others about how we use and look after them.
This is low tech car share, for people who want to change the mindset and move away from the traditional model of ownership being the only way to access. It also means that the CIC takes responsobility for repairs, costs and fuel because each of our members is supported with their time for volunteering in the community.
Have you got more thoughts about what we could do together? Well, let’s just set it up then!
If you are interested in these, just get in touch with Dora, Moopy or James.
Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.
This is not the way.
Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (
CtrlP
) instead.