Starting a Parish.
Two hundred and fifty members in one place and somebody willing to unlock a hall. That is the whole bar, and four proposals have failed to clear it.
How a parish opens.
Five steps, and the second one is where almost everything stops.
Somebody proposes a boundary.
Drawn round a landscape, not a county. It goes on the noticeboard for a month so people can say it is wrong, which they usually do.
Two hundred and fifty members sign it.
Members who would actually be in it. This is the number that stops most proposals, and it stops them for a good reason.
Somebody volunteers to be warden.
A named member who will set a date, find a room and publish a diary. Without one, a parish is a mailing list.
The parish confirms both at its first meet.
The boundary and the warden. If fewer than fifteen people come to the first meet, the parish stays provisional for six months.
It opens.
A page, a register, a diary and a tin for the hall hire. There is no launch and no announcement beyond the noticeboard.
The four that were turned down.
| Proposed | Members behind it | Warden | Why not |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Chilterns | 311 | None | Cleared the member threshold twice and never found anybody willing to stand. Still open as a proposal. |
| Greater London | 1,204 | Volunteered | Not a landscape. The proposal was to redraw it as three parishes and it has not been redrawn. |
| The Highlands | 96 | Volunteered | A long way short on members. Held open indefinitely because the warden is patient. |
| The Midlands | 2,880 | Volunteered | Too big and too vague. Splitting it into three was suggested and nobody has yet done the work. |
Why 250, and why a named person.
Two hundred and fifty is the number below which a monthly meet gets eight people twice and then stops. We know this because the first two parishes opened at about a hundred and forty and both of them nearly folded inside a year.
At two hundred and fifty, two per cent attendance is five people, three per cent is eight, and a bad month still produces a room rather than an embarrassment. It is not a scientific threshold. It is the number at which the thing stopped failing.
The warden requirement is stricter and less negotiable. A parish without a named person who will book a room is a mailing list with a map on it, and there are enough of those already.
The first two parishes opened at a hundred and forty members and both nearly folded. That is where the number came from.
What a new parish gets, and does not.
Provided
- A page and a register
- A published diary
- Hall hire reimbursed, within reason
- Access to the shared lending list
- A parish leaderboard, if the parish wants one
- Help drawing the boundary properly
Not provided
- Any payment to the warden
- A budget for anything beyond the room
- Staff support on the night
- A national leaderboard place
- Any obligation to hit a number
The questions people who want to start one ask.
No. Wardens stand down whenever they like and eleven of the twelve parishes have a member who would take it on. The one that does not is The Wolds, which is nine months old.
Then the two parishes sort it out between them on the noticeboard, which has happened twice and taken about a fortnight each time.
It can, and one nearly was. It would still need a warden and a published diary, because a group with no diary is a chat window and we already have those.
A tin passed round on the night, topped up by us where a parish cannot cover it. The Peak pays nine pounds an evening. The Fens pays twelve pounds an hour. Nobody has ever been short.
Propose one.
A boundary, two hundred and fifty members and somebody willing to unlock a hall.
