What type of legal structure should Burning Nest be?

Hi Paul (or anyone else seeing this thread), do you have an overview of the different legal structures for those of us less aware of what each structure means?

Could you share what our current legal structure is and reasons for choosing this structure?

Also FYI, I think we may struggle to be a registered UK charity from my understanding.

@maxgrant you will be best placed to answer this one

More information about eligibility to register as a charity in UK:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/what-makes-a-charity-cc4?step-by-step-nav=3dd66b86-ce29-4f31-bfa2-a5a18b877f11

Something I found online about CICs...

I'm not a lawyer, maybe someone else in the community is but in my experience of setting up new organisations, the legal entity you go for largely depends on your relationship with money and how you want to make decisions. Nest needs to be a legal entity because it trades. It rents the land, makes purchases like hiring loos and procures services like security. That is why we need a legal entity in the first place as without it nobody could sue us if we default on our contracts. We also need a license to operate and that needs to be with a legal entity, then there's the bank acount and so on. So the legal representatives are the decision makers who are ultimately responsbile for the activities being undertaken by the organisation, this is the Board. If somebody dies at Nest and it's proven to be down to negligence, it's a Board member who goes to jail. The constitution determines how Board members are elected and this is where the structures tend to differ. In a Company limited by Shares where the objective is to make money for shareholders, the voting is carred out on the basis of one share one vote. What I suggest we need is a structure that makes decisions on the basis of one member, one vote from a community of Members (all of us). So at the AGM, when it comes to voting on new Board members or if a resolution is put forward by a member, the vote is democratic and passed on a majority of votes. We don't have to rewrite these constitutions from scratch. We find one that meets our needs and adopt a governance template, maybe tweak it a bit here and there.

We can probably ignore the more profit making strcutures and a Charity, while an option, could be something of a stretch for us as our charitable objectives might be difficult to define. We therefore need to focus on Social Enterprise structures in my opinion. Here is guidance on some of the structures I mentioned earlier.

What are the reasons we need to be a legally recognisable entity?

Paul has written about this a few comments above :)

Thanks. I've added it to the context as I think it's good for everyone to start with that information.