Community Leader Service Agreement
Community Leader Service Agreement
Your appointment to Singing Mamas as a Community Leader
Hurrah and welcome! We are delighted that you’ve signed up as a Singing Mamas Community Leader. This document outlines the terms of engagement and provides you with all of the information you should need about your membership. We’re aware it sounds very formal in places; we just need to be really transparent about what this appointment means and what our respective responsibilities are.
- Contractual relationship
1.1 Singing Mamas Choir (trading as ‘Singing Mamas’®) are retaining your professional services on a self-employed basis. This means that you will be personally liable for your own income tax payments and National Insurance contributions.
1.2 You are not entitled to paid leave of absence for reasons of sickness, injury, holiday or for any other reason from Singing Mamas and we would advise you to make your own sick pay and pension arrangements.
1.3 You are not entitled to any of the statutory rights extended to an employee as defined in Section 230 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 and set out in that Act as a whole.
1.4 Working as a self-employed freelancer means you are responsible for managing the income, expenditure and activities necessary for delivering your community groups on a self-employed basis. This means you will invoice and receive payments directly from group members and pay any invoices associated with the delivery.
- Terms of payment
2.1 By signing up as a ‘Community Leader’ you are agreeing to pay a monthly licence fee of £10. Your licence will be valid from the date of your first payment and will terminate when written notice is given by either party.
2.2 If you fail to pay your monthly licence fee within 14 days of it being due, and do not give us notice of this then your licence may be withdrawn.
2.3 If you need to pause or change your membership at any time please do so in writing to [email protected]. Please note that an administrative fee of up to £25 may be applied should you pause / cancel your membership, then request to re-register.
- Terms of service
3.1 Singing Mamas will provide the following services to you as a Community Leader:
a) Access to the ‘Leader Library’ and ‘Songbank’ on our online portal.
b) Access to a private facebook group where you can access peer support.
c) Monthly online Q&A sessions.
d) Monthly online song sharing sessions.
e) Monthly online tutorial.
f) 1:1 support calls (which can be booked via a link).
g) Licence to use the Singing Mamas name and brand to promote your community group(s) (*for more information see the section on ‘Branding, Licensing and Communications below).
h) Insurance for your Singing Mamas community group(s) (*for more information see the section on ‘insurance below’).
3.2 Any training or events that fall outside of these services must be purchased at an additional cost).
- Restrictions of licence
4.1 As a Community Leader, you are licensed to deliver Singing Mamas directly to women in community groups.
4.2 As a Community Leader you are not licensed to use the Singing Mamas name, brand and / or track record to seek local grant funding or bid for statutory services commissions / contracts.
4.3 As a Community Leader you are not authorised to give permission for the Singing Mamas name or brand to be referenced in any grant applications, funding bids or tendering process made by any third party.
4.4 As a Community Leader you are not authorised to give permission for the Singing Mamas name or brand to be used on posters / flyers / templates or images outside of our own range of templates.
4.5 As a Community Leader, you may from time to time be in touch with health professionals (such as midwives and health visiting teams) to promote your community group(s). Any such contact should use standard phrasing / templates (which can be found in the Leader Library) and must make clear that you are working on a freelance basis as a Community Leader.
4.6 Should a health professional or third party express an interest in funding a Singing Mamas project, you must refer them to the central organisation.
4.7 Should you wish to deliver funded or partnership projects you will require additional training and ‘Registered Practitioner‘ membership.
- Working on a ‘Not for Profit’ basis
5.1 Singing Mamas are a ‘Community Interest Company’ which means that any profits made from our activities have to be reinvested back into our aim of ‘empowering women to improve their wellbeing by creating song-sharing communities’.
5.2 When we talk about profit this means the amount of money received from an activity (income) minus all of the costs related to the delivery of the activity (expenditure).
5.3 Expenditure includes things like room hire and refreshments but also the costs of the Community Leader themselves. When we calculate a Community Leader's costs to deliver a session we consider fair remuneration to between £35 – £55 per hour. This does not just include the time spent setting up and delivering choirs, but also includes administration time, time spent on marketing, session planning, rehearsing, communicating with group members etc.
5.4 Based on a maximum group size of 40 people paying no more than £12 per hour, we have calculated that Community Leaders would ‘break even’ (i.e - the amount of income would be equal to fair expenditure) and are therefore operating on a not-for-profit basis.
5.5 If your group size exceeded 40 or charges rose above £12pp-ph, you should get in touch with us so we can calculate if you have reached the threshold of operating on a profit making basis. If we agree that you have reached this threshold then you will be expected to donate the surplus back into the CIC for charitable reinvestment.
5.6 This means all Community Leaders can be clear with their stakeholders that they are working on a not-for-profit basis and that any profits are reinvested back into a charitable organisation. As well as generating good-will, this might also lead to helpful cost-savings as many venues have sliding scales based on the type of organisation hiring.
- Branding, licensing and communications
6.1 You are granted a royalty free licence to use the Singing Mamas name and branding to promote your community groups for the length of time you have membership. You will be provided with a suite of branding assets (such as templates for leaflets/ posters / banners etc) and ‘branding guidelines’ which you must follow.
6.2 You and your group members will also have access to a national Singing Mamas facebook group which is updated centrally, and you may also choose to make your own local page to support your marketing.
6.3 Whenever you are representing Singing Mamas, you should always communicate in a way which reflects the company’s values of ‘courage’, ‘connectedness’ and ‘inclusion’. (*For more detailed information on what this means in practice, see the branding guidelines).
6.4 If we believe you have deliberately or recklessly ignored the branding guidelines and represented yourself or Singing Mamas in a way that could damage our reputation then this may lead to your appointment and relationship being terminated.
6.5 In special circumstances, where a Community Leader joins the network with an existing and established brand identity for their singing groups, then it may be possible to agree ‘joint branding. Any such agreements will be made in writing and in addition to the agreement here.
- Insurance
7.1 Whenever you deliver self-employed activities under the Singing Mamas brand you will be covered under the insurance of the CIC providing you are adhering to our policies. This includes £2 million in public liability insurance.
7.2 In addition, our insurance also covers our self-employed contractors against injury of up to £10 million as if they were employees.
- Intellectual property
8.1 As a member of the network and Singing Mamas Community Leader, you will have access to commercially valuable information such as our training materials, handbooks and policies.
8.2 Such information must be kept confidential. Sharing of documents or information which is not in the public domain may constitute a breach of copyright.
8.3 Community Leaders should not deliver projects that utilise aspects of the Singing Mamas® approach without crediting the organisation.
- Policies and procedures
9.1 To support you in your work as a self-employed Community Leader representing Singing Mamas, you will be provided with four key policies: Safeguarding; Health & Safety; Equality, Inclusion & Diversity; and Data Protection.
9.2 All policy guidance documents are available in the ‘Leader Library’ section of our online portal.
9.3 You should take all reasonable measures to adhere to these policies. If we believe you have been deliberately or recklessly ignoring these policies then your appointment and relationship with Singing Mamas may be terminated.
This doesn’t mean we expect you never to make a mistake or get things wrong. In fact, when things don’t go to plan we want you to share it with the network so that we can all learn and improve. We are human and we will all make mistakes, and when you do you will have the full support of a network of women ready to lift you back up.
- Terms of Service Agreement
10.1 The terms and conditions of this Service Agreement have been agreed upon as part of your purchase of Community Leader Membership.
10.2 This Agreement is valid for the duration of your Community Leader Membership.
