Its official, we have a new member. The wonderful, the notorious, the fabulous… Maddy Neghabian! Member number 8 brings with her a 50/50 gender split within members for the first time in its history. Gone are the days that there are more Matts than females. PHEW. (Matt & Matt, we still love you).

Who is Maddy Neghabian?

Who isn’t she. Maddy has been working predominantly alongside Polly for 4 years down at Space 4, building the community and network that surrounds it, managing the space, building awareness of Outlandish and Space 4, forging local relationships with Islington Council and local businesses and being across our comms and marketing. In the last year she has started to become more involved in Outlandish circles (we use Sociocracy as our governance structure) and today is running payroll on her own for the first time as part of her finance circle responsibilities!

What changes when you become a member?

In some ways, not loads – you carry on bringing the value you did as a collaborator and Outlander ( a status of people working with Outlandish who are moving towards being a member) with an aim to grow personally and bring more value to Outlandish through your efforts. But in others there are plenty of changes.

Practically:

  • Maddy will now be employed by Outlandish and receive a salary each month, so no more personal tax returns!
  • Receive a pension as part of this package
  • Receive paid leave, accrued as a percentage of hours worked
  • Paid day off on her birthday + a birthday present
  • Attend members only meetings where key decisions that affect the business happen

But the real change comes with the mindset that members take on, and the change to your responsibility. So now when we make a proposal to invest some of our money into something, its your money in the bank we are spending, rather than some magic money tree. Your range of tolerance for how and what we spend our money on evolves.

As a member, you do have more job security, as in, if the work dries up, as long as we have reserves we expect us all to commit to turning things around (and getting paid for doing it) rather than needing to stop working with people if there is no commercial work to give them.

You have more power – some people see this as a benefit, others see it as a responsibility, but you are have more freedom and ability to make changes to the business by making proposals. And we all actively encourage each other to do that. If you see an opportunity for the business, or a problem that needs solving, its even more your job as a member to do something about it!

But before all that responsibility takes hold, we will be celebrating with Maddy, its fabulous to be joined by another human who cares passionately about what we are doing and can share the load in helping us achieve all that we can.

We love you Maddy!