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Category: General

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General

Help Share Bristol Grow – Support Our Big Give Fundraiser!

Double your impact and help us bring borrowing to more communities across Bristol.

At Share Bristol, we believe in a world where everyone can borrow instead of buy. Our Library of Things lets people borrow everything from drills to disco balls, helping reduce waste, save money, and build stronger communities. But we want to do more — and we need your help.

From midday on Monday 23rd to Monday 30th June 2025, we’re taking part in the Big Give Small Charity Week, and every donation you make will be doubled!

Make a donation through our fundraiser, or use the site to pay for your annual membership, and your £50 becomes £100! Plus your support helps us:

    • Plan towards opening our next Library of Things location in the Bristol area

    • Keep our Library of Things well-stocked with Things to borrow

    • Reach more people with affordable, sustainable borrowing

    • Keep our service accessible to everyone, no matter their income

How you can help:

    • Donate now, purchase or renew your membership, via our Big Give page: tinyurl.com/ShareBristol2025
    • To purchase or renew a membership on our Big Give Page simply make a donation for the correct amount of the membership cost, leave your contact details and we will contact you to confirm when you would like your membership/renewal to start. You will not lose out if your renewal date is not now – we will add an extra year from the date your renewal is due.
      • Membership costs:
        • Standard membership: £50 (less than a pound a week!)
        • Supporter membership: £80 (subsidises one Concession member)
        • Concession: £20, if you’re unable to afford our Standard rates

    • Share the campaign with friends, family, and colleagues

    • Tell your story—have you borrowed from us? Let others know how it helped you!

    • Together, we can make borrowing the norm and buying the exception. Let’s build a greener, fairer Bristol—one borrowed Thing at a time.

Categories
General Recruitment

Join our Trustee team

We’ve just become a charity and we’re looking for two new Trustees. If you’re an expert in marketing or finance, then read on! 

Share Bristol logo - square

At Share Bristol, our vision is that everybody shares. And on our Board, this means sharing responsibility for the organisation and its running. 

We are a collaborative team, with each Trustee having responsibility for a particular area or project, and a flat decision making structure, with no Chair of Trustees. We communicate frequently through our project management software so we know what each other are up to and get feedback before we act if appropriate. Whilst we make our big decisions by consensus, we aren’t a talking shop – we understand who has subject matter expertise, and trust and empower them to make decisions where needed. 

We’re looking for two people in particular to join our team:
– Finance lead – someone who is as happy paying invoices and instructing our external payroll company as they are preparing management accounts and predicting our cashflow
– Marketing and engagement lead – someone who has expertise in marketing strategy, able to take the wide view on how we persuade everyone in Bristol to borrow instead of buy, our existing members to renew their memberships year after year and to build relationships with other organisations

Of course, everyone who joins our Board of Trustees has to care about what we’re doing – being passionate about sustainability and keen to help local communities, as well as able to work effectively as part of our team. 

Although at the moment our Library is only in Kingswood, we will be opening in Bedminster soon, and have plans to expand across the city. So please don’t think you shouldn’t apply because we aren’t local to you – join us and help us open a Library in your local area as well as take the lead on one of the areas above. 

All the details of our Trustee recruitment process is on our website (here), so have a look and then get in touch and share your skills and experience! 

Categories
General Recruitment

An eye for detail?

Looking at documents

As Share Bristol steps up to be a registered charity, we need some help to ensure we are excellently run.

Do you have an eye for detail? Consider yourself a reliable, safe pair of hands? Have experience of or aspire to work with a Board of Trustees? Care about the environment and want to actually make a difference in your local area? 

We recently transitioned from a Community Interest Company to a Registered Charity (read our blog on this here), and this has increased the regulatory requirements on our small organisation. We pride ourselves on doing things well and professionally, and want to ensure we meet all the standards rightly expected of charities, and ideally exceed them. 

Our Trustee team each have a portfolio of responsibilities, such as finance or fundraising, and also spend hours each month volunteering in a Library of Things. But we don’t have anyone whose focus is on governance and compliance, and, from our experience elsewhere, we think an objective Company or Board Secretary would really help. 

Although there are some things that we definitely want this person to do for us, and with us, there are also lots of other opportunities to get involved, depending on your interests and preferences. We’re a friendly, highly collaborative team, getting involved and supporting each other when needed, and we welcome people from backgrounds that are not well represented in the charity or environmental sector. 

If you think you could work alongside our Board of Trustees, helping us to go from strength to strength and ensure more and more people across Bristol are borrowing instead of buying, please get in touch by emailing hello@sharebristol.igocode.com and telling us a bit about you. 

Categories
General

Share Bristol is changing! 

Yours, Mine, Ours

Until November, our legal name was Share Bristol CIC – with the CIC standing for Community Interest Company, a type of legal structure meaning the organisation couldn’t be used for commercial ends. It was a relatively quick and easy way to set up the organisation back in the middle of COVID-19 lockdowns, but it did have some limitations.

Over the summer, with a bit of pro bono help from the legal eagles at Bevan Brittan and lots of patience from a couple of our more detail-orientated Directors, we worked towards becoming a Registered Charity. In November, we finally got the approval – we are now a charity! So, we’ve lost the CIC from our name, but hope to gain so much more…. 

Firstly, not many people know what a CIC is, but pretty much everyone understands that a charity is there for public good, to provide a really worthwhile service, and that funds cannot be spent on anything except trying to provide that service. So we thought being a charity would be a great way to quickly communicate that we are just here to make the world a better place. 

Secondly, we rely on grants and other donations to make ends meet. As a CIC we weren’t eligible for all grants, but as a charity we should be. And as a charity we can claim Gift Aid on donations from UK taxpayers, which can add 25% to their value.

Thirdly, with plans to open our second site soon, in Bedminster, and to expand across the city after that, we’ve been really worried about the cost of business rates. We don’t have to pay them at the moment, as with one site we are too small to incur them, but that would change as soon as we opened Bedminster. As a charity, we hope to get relief from the vast majority of business rates – making the chances of each Library covering its costs much more realistic. 

So, three good reasons to change we thought. We hope you agree too and can see the sense. 

So what does it mean? 

In practice, for our members and volunteers, it doesn’t mean anything, except that we hope this change will help us be even bigger and better in future. 

For our volunteers on the Board, it changes a lot more. We’re still Directors under company law, but are also now Trustees registered with the Charity Commission, and there are more regulations, governance rules and reporting to make sure we are maintaining the high standards expected of all charities. It will take us a while to get everything updated to reflect our new name and status, and we need to be careful we’re doing everything right. 

We’re looking for a new Trustee actually, to help us with this. So if you know someone who is great with regulations, has an eye for detail and is a safe pair of hands, please let them know we are looking for someone just like them! 

Thank you for your support in helping us get this far. We look forward to the next, charitable, chapter. 

Your Board of Trustees,

Ben, Anna P, Lindsay, Josh, Anna R and Karen