Re: Membership subscription temporary suspension

[Gavin Atkinson]

A couple of clarifications to this email...

On Fri, 27 Mar 2020 at 21:15, <n...@york.hackspace.org.uk> wrote:

Hi everyone

Here is a summation of the meeting on membership subscriptions that we
held this morning.

The UK government has provided the local authorities with financial
backing to provide various levels of relief to businesses. We should
expect to hear more about what we can expect to receive within the next
week.

We have no idea if we will be eligible for anything here - we suspect we may be, but as with everything at the moment the fine details seem to still be getting hammered out and until we are in receipt of some sort of confirmation we should likely work on the assumption we won't receive anything.

The council has given us the option to defer out rent payments for the
next quarter (Apr-Jun) into the two quarters after that (Jul-Dec).
However, our current financial position leads us to not feel the need to
do this.

To clarify this - it is not that our financial position is good enough that we don't need to worry about this - it isn't - but rather that merely postponing rent liability doesn't help us in any way given our income is purely from membership and therefore mostly static and predictable.  i.e. we're unlikely to be able to increase our membership over the next six months sufficiently that delaying this liability is beneficial, and therefore there's no benefit to us in delaying these inevitable payments; conversely maintaining predictable outgoings helps members see exactly what our financial status is.

Right now, York Hackspace is inaccessible, and the usual services we
provide to members are unreachable. As a result, we have made the decision
to make membership subscriptions for the next three months (Apr-Jun)
completely optional. If you don't feel that you are able to afford your
membership at the current time, then please feel free to suspend payments
until July, or reduce them to any level you feel comfortable with.

We will review this at the end of June and update members of the current
situation as further national and local government advice becomes
available.

My feeling here is that we should review things every three weeks in line with the current government plan, rather than assuming things will be all fixed on and not before the 1st July.

But to emphasize the above - members should absolutely feel they can reduce or suspend their membership payments in the interim. If you do so though, it would be appreciated if you could please just drop trea...@york.hackspace.org.uk a quick note so that I can keep track of membership numbers, our financial position, etc.

Please be aware that if you choose to reduce your contributions during the
suspension period, it will not in any way affect your membership or voting
rights.

I will continue to keep you updated as this situation progresses. If you
have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Gavin (hat: treasurer) 

[Graeme Symington]

Hi Gavin

I have reduced my payments to York Hackspace to £5 a month - I started contributing the full amount to the Hackspace in April but with lockdown I have never been able to attend as a member so feel a bit in no-man’s-land. Current finances make it difficult to maintain paying the full amount whilst not being able to use the space - I hopes you all understand and I look forward to being able to start using the space properly in the future

Graeme

On 27 Mar 2020, at 9:54 pm, Gavin Atkinson <gavin.a...@gmail.com> wrote:



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