We’ve Started a Community Association in Moira. Here’s the Digital Kit Behind It

Co-founding Moira Community Association as its first Treasurer, and the Facebook group, bank account, forms and payments a new village group needs on day one.

Published on April 05, 2022

A personal one this week. Last month a few of us in Moira set up a community association for the village, and I’ve ended up as its first Treasurer. This post is about why, and about the digital side of getting a brand-new volunteer organisation off the ground, because that turned out to be most of the job.

Moira Community illustration of neighbours litter picking, watering planters and Santa arriving in a red truck — Moira Community: neighbours, planters and litter pickers.

Why Moira needed one

Moira is a great village. Long main street, good pubs, a demesne, a lot of people who care about the place. What it didn’t have, coming out of two years of lockdowns, was anywhere to bring an idea. If you wanted to run a litter pick or a Christmas event or a group for families with additional needs, there was no committee to go to, no bank account to pay for it from and no obvious way to tell the village it was happening.

So we started Moira Community Association. The idea is simple: a pot of money for community projects, and a committee anyone local can join. You pitch an idea, it gets a bit of money and a bit of help, and it happens. Cross-community, open to everyone. The long-term ambition (and it is long-term) is a community centre for the village.

One thing we agreed at the first meeting: it can’t depend on us. Leadership rotates every two years. Everything gets written down. If the founders all moved away tomorrow, the next people should be able to pick it up.

The digital kit

You can’t run a community group in 2022 without it being, in practice, a small digital organisation. Here is what we set up in the first few weeks, and why.

A Facebook group and a page. The group, Moira Community Notice Board, is the village noticeboard, and it is already the fastest way to reach people here. The page is the association’s official voice. Keeping the two separate matters: the group belongs to the village, the page belongs to the committee.

A bank account with proper signatories. Slower than anything else on this list. If you are starting a group, start this first.

A way to take money online. Payment links so people can donate or pay for an event without a card machine or a bucket. I’ll write more about this once we have run something through it.

Forms instead of emails. A form for “I want to list an event” and a form for “here are photos from the event”, feeding into a shared table the committee can see. It sounds trivial. It is the difference between a committee that works and one that spends every meeting hunting through inboxes.

A newsletter list. For everyone who isn’t on Facebook, which in a village is more people than you think.

A website, eventually. Not yet. Right now the Facebook group does the job, and I would rather get the boring things right first.

Why this is on the Invisible Building blog

Because it is tech for good, just not the kind with an app at the end. Most of what I’ve done for charities (Mood Matters with AWARE, FixIT with Barnardo’s) has been building a product. This is the other side of it: the plumbing that lets ordinary people in a village get organised. Bank account, forms, a Facebook group run properly, a constitution that survives its founders. It is unglamorous and it is exactly where most community groups fall over.

If you are thinking about starting something similar where you live: do it. You don’t need to be an expert. You need a handful of people, a bank account and a way to tell the village. I’ll keep writing about how it goes.