Correspondence: A Circle Asks to Become a House

[i. From the convener of a circle, 11 March 2022]

We are twenty-six and we have been twenty-six or thereabouts for six years. A building on our street has come up at a rent we could carry between us. We could sleep four, cook for forty, and keep the gleaning kitchen in it all year instead of six weeks. We are aware of the standing order. We are asking anyway, because it seems to us that the order was written for circles that wanted to be important and not for circles that want a sink.

[ii. Reply, from the stewardship, 4 May 2022]

Thank you for asking plainly, and for asking before signing anything.

The answer is no, and it is not a judgement on you. It is worth setting out why, since you are entitled to more than the clause number.

A house is a roof over people who are asleep. That is the whole of the difference. Everything the Institute has learned about houses — the residential periods, the reviews, the insurance, the arrangements for a resident who becomes ill, the arrangements for a resident who becomes difficult, the cold-weather duty, the fact that somebody must be there at three in the morning — follows from people sleeping in the building. Those obligations are carried by the stewardship and cannot be delegated to a body that meets on Tuesdays. If we let a circle take them on, we would have handed a small group of volunteers a set of duties that has broken larger and better-resourced organisations than ours, and we would have done it because they were enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is exactly the wrong reason.

There is a second reason and it is less flattering to us. A circle that acquires a building acquires a landlord's interests: a lease to service, a rent to raise, a reason to want more people in the room. Within five years the circle's business is the building. We have watched it happen elsewhere and we would rather not learn it again at your expense.

What you may do is a good deal. You may hire the kitchen for as many weeks as you can staff. You may ask your house to make its own application for premises, which the stewardship will consider on the ordinary grounds and will probably refuse, for the ordinary reason that we can only keep what we can keep well. You may ask for a residential period at Orchard House for the whole circle at once, which has been done twice and is a great deal of fun. And you may go on doing the thing you are actually good at, which is fruit.

You are not less than a house. You are a different obligation, and the one you have is not small.

— For the stewardship, N. Whitlock