THE INSTITUTION
Four entities, one property
Four distinct entities stand on a single property, with separate accounts and incompatible offices. The separation is the guarantee of all parties.
The separation is the guarantee of all parties, and it must be written before anyone arrives. Four distinct legal entities stand on a single property, with separate accounts and offices incompatible with one another.
- 1.
The House. The association of the members, with statutes, rules of the workshop and of common life, admission on application and an arbitration clause. It does not own the property outright: the buildings are bound to their purpose and are not sold except unanimously. - 2. The farm. A cooperative whose working members are the members of the House. It keeps the buildings in agricultural use, supplies the table, binds the apprentices to a season and a harvest, and sells the surplus, assigning the proceeds to the House, like any agricultural cooperative.
- 3.
Al-Munya. The paying guesthouse: a few rooms in a separate building with its own entrance, in a distinct vehicle with its own investors. It pays the House a fixed annual sum, never a percentage of its revenue, and must keep its full value even if the passage to the House’s premises is permanently closed. - 4.
An-Nudamā’. The association of the supporters, an autonomous entity that capitalises Al-Munya and uses its lodging. Membership gives access to the public programme and confers no entitlement to admission to the House nor access to common life.
Why four and not one
A single entity holding together school, farm, hospitality and fundraising would be simpler to set up and far more fragile. The separation serves three purposes: it prevents paid hospitality from conditioning the life of the members; it prevents financial support from turning into power over the bodies; and it allows each activity to be financed by its own investors without weighing on the others.
Those who support do not govern
The resolutions of the assembly are not subject to approval, confirmation, veto or reform by the founder, the funders, the supporters or those who endow named funds. To none of these are reserved powers of appointment in the bodies, additional voting rights, special categories of members or the power to suspend the effect of resolutions. The clause can be amended only by unanimity of the members.
Whoever funds buys one thing only, and it is the thing worth funding: that the house exists and works. He does not buy a voice in how it is governed, because a house ruled by those who pay for it is not the institution this project takes up — it is the one in which the institution went wrong.