Community Interest Companies

I've been thinking about CICs since setting one up was proposed at the meeting about the Library cuts, and how the purpose they've been set up for has changed over the years.

A Community Interest Company is a limited company which is set up for social enterprises that want to use their profits and assets for the public good, according to Wikipedia. CICs were first introduced in 2005, and about 10,000 of them have been set up in the first ten years of their existence.

The first CIC in Hay was the Department of Enjoyment, set up to organise Hay-on-Fire. So here was a group of people who were fund raising so that they could set off a massive amount of fireworks and have beat up old cars chasing each other round the Warren with flame throwers on the front! (It was awesome!).

The second local CIC was the Hay Community Enterprise, set up in 2008, which saved the Cheesemarket from dereliction. The upstairs is now a holiday flat, and the downstairs is available for stalls to hire for markets and community events. They've done a wonderful job on it. With the profits from renting out the flat and market space, they can also offer grants to local groups, such as Fair in the Square, Hay Does Vintage, the Eliza Trail (the children's local history trail) and research by the Hay History Group, which did a lot of work on finding out the history of the Cheesemarket itself.
One of the fund raising ideas was to have a tile picture, now displayed in the lower part of the Cheesemarket - I was one of the many local people who bought a tile for it. The book recording all the donors is on permanent display at Hay Library - or it was when the website was last updated.
What they don't mention on their website is why they were saving the Cheesemarket from dereliction.
The building was owned by Powys County Council (Hay Community Enterprise are leasing it from them).
So in three years we've already gone from setting up a CIC to set off fireworks, to the more serious aim of saving an important local historic building from dereliction.

And now in 2019, we're seriously considering setting up a CIC to save an essential local service - to keep a paid librarian in Hay Library.

I think I want to go back to 2006....