Changing from a charity to something that doesn't require any parents to join a committe-can it be done?

[Eddas]

As the title says is it possible to change a committee run/charity pre-school into something that doesn't have to have a committee? and if so what and how?!

I have looked at the archives but can't find much in the way of an answer, just the question being asked!!

TIA

We achieved this by getting another charity to take us over! So now the preschool is run as part of a group of related charity programmes, with trustees for the entire group, trustees that are very invested and experienced and committed. There are professional managers supervising almost all the day-to-day management at preschool, including things like hiring, appraisals, CRB checks, annual accounts, etc. I believe that the old Preschool committee (amateur volunteers) just does fundraising now.

It took about 18 months to go thru the process of transfer, btw, not quick and easy at all.

Yes you can but it doesn't seem the easiest thing. I did some research on it for our preschool. It involves winding up the preschool in its current form, disposing of all assets re PSLA and charity comission guidelines, then starting again as a business. You would need to re hire staff on different contracts, you would need a manager, there would be start up costs, possible problems over buildings, buying new equipment, the list goes on and on.

Unless you have an obvious person who would like to set up running pre school as a business it would appear a long and hard process. We considered it, decided against it and decided to work harder to recruit committee members.

PSLA website was very useful as was our local sure start. Good luck.

Thank you for your replies As is probably obvious we have had our AGM and although a couple of people stepped up many more stepped down and we are now finding ourselves short by one Treasurer. Which is my fault as I have to step down. I am now doing a paid role within pre-school so cannot stay on even if I wanted to.

It just seems to be this way all the time and there's alot of responsibility shouldered by volunteers. The manager emailed and asked if there was a way that the staff could be the committee(I have started another thread re that) and I thought the only other way out of the eternal search for committee memebers is to try and get rid of it altogether.

Food for thought already. Thank you.

Do you have any paid admin support at your preschool? You can farm out lots of the day to day treasurer stuff to them, thus making the volunteer role more of an overseeing position which might be easier to fill? Or search out in the local community for a retired accountant etc. Committee members don't have to have children at the preschool.

If you are a member of the pre school learning alliance it is a complete nightmare.........

One thing ours did was employ and administrator so the committee roles were less repsonsibility.

mummyrev, yep ME i've taken over from the admin lady and do virtually everything a 'traditional' treasurer would do(I also work as an accountant on other days!). We're sending out a letter this week saying that the role is that involved but needs to be filled. We're hoping someone will come forward as it really it just a case of reconciling the bank and doing a very simple end of year summary. I've even set the spreadsheet up to automatically do everything!!

We looked at doing this 3 years ago but it's not easy if you're in PSLA as you need to dispose of all group assets (to or via PSLA) before you start up again. In our case we had savings to cover potential redundancy payments (two staff members been there >15years so big liability) not to mention all of the equipment. According to the constitution we had, we'd have had to give it all away.

We ended up making it abundantly clear to the parents that unless there was a functioning committee the preschool would close - with very little notice. Funnily enough people then decided that perhaps they could manage to volunteer.

Ww were in exactly the same boat as bumpy becky, we had 4 long term staff so huge liability.

I think the letter that went out was "we cannot legally operate without a committee, we need an x y & z if we do not have them the pre-school will be closing"

We got them in the end.........

we're about to send out a very similar letter, we only really need one more person(sadly none of the other 'just' members want to be treasurer)

Thank you for all your time in replying. I really appreciate it