Image credit: Abigail Low on Unsplash
Fearlessly is fully committed to transparency, and we’ve realised that perhaps not everyone who follows or reads us knows immediately how we are organised and funded. So we’ve put together this handy list of FAQs on important topics such as what a social enterprise is, what our funding model is right now and what our plans are for the future.
We hope you enjoy the read, and if you have any ideas or feedback, please do get in touch!
If Fearlessly is about empowerment and mental health, why don’t you pay volunteer contributors, particularly ones from marginalised groups?
2018 is Fearlessly’s first year of operation and our funding is for a pilot project that demonstrates social innovation. We have the social aim of breaking down mental health stigma and helping to replace it with community, particularly for young women and non-binary people dealing with mental health issues.
In case you didn’t know, we’re a social enterprise, which means we don’t have any shareholders who profit from Fearlessly – instead, any profits we make are reinvested back into supporting our social mission and community. This makes us very unlike commercial magazines, who are designed to make profits for individual shareholders. In contrast, Fearlessly is all about profiting our community as a whole by supporting their mental health, in much the same way as a charity.
Our initial plans were to pay our contributing writers and artists, and in our early days we had hoped to launch a crowdfunding campaign for this very purpose. But a month before we planned to crowdfund, we found out we were successful in applying for other funding that would help us launch Fearlessly. This funding, though, was specifically and exclusively for paying staff. We had still hoped to pay contributors through other fundraising and income-generating efforts (such as our pay-what-you-can-afford subscriptions model), but we then discovered that a condition of our funding is that any income generated in 2018 is deducted immediately in kind. This model means that any revenue from subscriptions is essentially given back to the funders, and even if we tried to voluntarily gift back salary to the company, we’d then lose the equivalent amount from funding there too.
It’s a catch-22 but, overall, this initial funding, to support a pilot project to explore and test an innovative social project – i.e. Fearlessly – has been a god-send as it has allowed us to get Fearlessly off the ground. And if we are successful in the next post-funding phase of what we plan to do, which is to become financially sustainable with income generated from other means, everything changes and we’ll be able to pay contributors.
Essentially, we’re playing a long game because we figure in the middle of a mental health crisis, doing something is better than doing nothing. But a happy side-effect is we’re making a difference to people’s lives now – those who write for our magazine and for those who read it – and that’s hugely worth the energy we’re putting into this project.
We’ve sought to be totally honest with our volunteer contributors that we are unable to pay them right now. And in response, our contributors have repeatedly told us that, firstly, that they’re happy to donate their work to our project as they know it’s ultimately helping other people who are in a similar situation, and secondly, many of our contributors have told us that voluntarily contributing to Fearlessly has improved their wellbeing and mental health, through the cathartic experience of creative expression. So we hope we’re doing something right, by creating a space in which people are sharing their stories, building a community, reaching out to others, and ultimately improving people’s mental health.
Do you have a massive pot of money you’re not sharing fairly?
No, sadly we don’t. It’s a lovely visualisation, we’ll admit, even though we’re proudly anti-capitalist in our ethos. What we do have is a set of targets we must meet on a monthly and quarterly basis over a period of one year (2018) during this pilot project. We provide monthly and quarterly reports telling our funders how we’ve met our targets and, if they’re happy (and so far they’ve been delighted), each quarter we get another chunk of funding released to pay modest part-time salaries, and core costs such as insurance, payroll and our very modest office fees.
Do you have plans in future to pay contributors?
Yes, we do. What we hope will happen is that in 2019 we’ll be successful with other funding applications to scale-up our activities, which will allow us to not only carry on with what we’ve established so far, but also to continue innovating and growing through becoming self-sustaining. Our post-funding plans include things like working transparently with ethical advertisers, producing merchandise, selling subscriptions packages to organisations that are responsible for the wellbeing of large numbers of young adults, and offering other resilience-building workshops and services. Once we can pay our own bills and generate some profit, we’ll immediately use that profit to pay contributors and provide them with other forms of support, such as creative workshops to nurture and refine our contributors’ talents and skills even further, which they can use to develop their future careers. In fact, we can’t wait to do so! It’s a hard constraint to be patient with, but it keeps us focused on building our social enterprise and increasing our impact day by day in the meantime.
What about subscriber’s fees? You offer a membership – are you squirrelling away the income to buy designer sunglasses?
At Fearlessly we have a strict policy around regularly losing our umbrellas, glasses and keys so you’ll find no designer sunglasses round our gaff. At the moment we have about 100 members of our Rebelle Base membership community, with most people subscribing at a rate of just £1 per month (as we’re a socially conscientious outfit, we offer a ‘pay-what-you-can-afford’ membership model). Every quarter we report our subscriber numbers to our funders and, if we’ve gained any new subscriptions, their equivalent value is deducted from our funding for the period ahead. This model makes us profit-neutral on subscriptions within our current constraints. However, once we enter our post-funding scaling-up period, we will be able to re-invest the profits from these hugely important subscriptions, and the first thing we’ll do with them is pay our volunteer contributors.
I still don’t understand the whole ‘we have no profit but we pay our staff’ thing. What other organisations operate on the same kind of basis?
Well, there’s charities. And other social enterprises. And cooperative societies. And trusts… But it’s a fair comment. Compared to what we’ve been conditioned to be used to in western societies, social enterprises, not-for-profits, community interest companies and outreach initiatives are different. But everything new is different until it’s normal – and we’d love for every company in the world to become a social enterprise and to be not only motivated, but actually legally required, to re-invest any profits into their community because, well, wouldn’t the world be a more equal, just and caring place?
Fearlessly is proudly a part of the growing social enterprise and voluntary sector in the UK, where staff are employed to undertake a wide range of activities to meet our social mission, where volunteers donate their time and work to support our social mission, and where any profits that we do plan to make are reinvested back into supporting our social aims – which is to help improve the mental health of young women and non-binary people. As a Community Interest Company (CIC) we are regulated by the UK’s government-run CIC Regulator (which you can find more about here) to ensure we are acting with integrity and according to our social enterprise values at all times.
If you’re interested in other businesses that operate in similar ways to ourselves, to reassure you that the CIC model is a viable, increasingly attractive idea we’re delighted to signpost you to some business peers and heroes here…
The Grassmarket Community Project
…to name just a few in this global changemaking community!
What was that word you used? A CIC? Can you tell me more?
Certainly! We love telling people about our legal structure (yep, we admit we’re nerds). We are a Community Interest Company – or a CIC (pronounced kick :-)) – that is limited by guarantee, and we were legally incorporated in May 2017. A CIC is a limited company with special features to ensure that it works for the benefit of the community, and as we are limited by guarantee we have no shareholders or anyone profiting from our activities. Our CIC is governed by a Board of Directors, who volunteer their time and energy voluntarily and gladly to support our social mission.
When we registered as a CIC, we had to supply information to the CIC regulator to give evidence of our social mission, and to show how Fearlessly’s activities will benefit the community. Here’s what we said:
“The company’s activities will provide benefit to young women in the UK who are dealing with stress, anxiety or other emotional or psychological challenges, as well as their families and friends. In particular, the objective of the company is to improve the wellbeing and resilience of young women so that they can cope with the pressures that modern life throws at them and fully engage in society at large… If the company makes any surplus it will be re-invested into activities and projects that support the mental health of young women in the UK.”
The other cool and special thing about CICs is that they commit their assets and profits permanently to the community by means of an “asset lock”, ensuring that assets cannot be distributed to shareholders. This asset lock and community purpose means that our social mission is protected. We also have to report to the Regulator of Community Interest Companies, so it’s clear that our not-for-profit status is visible as well as assured.
Magazines are all about money though, and litmags are often about writing as a high art, innovation or social questioning. Are you saying you’re kinda not predominantly about any of these things?
Fearlessly is first and foremost a mental health project and community. Part of that project, along with conducting research which aims to influence mental health policy at the Scottish and UK levels, is running a website full of community member’s creativity and shared experience as well as editorial that aims to inspire and empower. Our project is specifically trying to reduce a mental health crisis for young women and non-binary people by encouraging creativity and community as valid, proven pathways for improving resilience and building more caring societies.
As we are most visible as a website and on social media, most of the creativity we share as our own content and host for volunteers is written in the forms of articles, creative prose and poetry, and most of the art we deal with is illustrative, painted, comic, audio or film.
Most of our contributors do not consider themselves to be professional writers or artists but do have aspirations to begin (or further) their experience of submitting work, being edited and taking part in online social spaces where they can share experiences with people in similar shoes to their own. That said, we have also received support from professional writers and artists who believe in what we’re doing and want to amplify our message by sharing their work on our platform too, and we love that because the absolute best of what happens online is, in our experience, the collaborative stuff.
So, even though you may have come to us as a platform that publishes content from a variety of contributors, it’s important to bear in mind we’re a mental health project at heart. Half of what we do in terms of research and outreach happens behind the scenes of the website; as time goes on we’re trying really hard to make that behind-the-scenes stuff like research and social impact more visible because it’s really important to us to try and change the policy context on mental health, and we think the more you know about it, the better you’ll understand Fearlessly as well.
PS If you’re handy with a camera and want to help make some wee films, do let us know 😉
Where can I get more information?
We’re happy to answer any questions you may have – just send us an email at info@fearlessly.co.uk. We’re keen to be as open and transparent as possible, in line with our founding principles. So if you have any feedback, or any suggestions or ideas for funders, funding and modelling, please just drop us a line!
