Our organizational guideline is a comprehensive roadmap that helps you to navigate through all that matters in and around oikos, building up on our constitution. The guideline offers an overview for everyone who wants to learn more about how we function and why we do what we do. Enjoy browsing through the summaries and overviews, and make sure to follow some of the links to relevant documents (eg. our field guides).

This guide elaborates how oikos works on a chapter, community and international level - and how these different layers are connected. We use the term oikos to describe the oikos community as a whole, oikos chapter(s) to talk specifically about 1 or a group of chapters and oikos International to talk about the umbrella organization with the international initiatives & the international team.

Overview: Your Red Thread through oikos

HOW WE AT OIKOS CHANGE THE WORLD

• In a Nutshell: What is oikos? -> the meaning behind our name, an introduction to oikos International, our global community & what transparency means to us

• Why We Do What We Do -> our mission, vision and how we got here

• What We Do to Change the World -> what happens in the chapters and how we tend to our community (Leadership Development, Transforming Education, Community-Centred Initiatives)

DRIVING CHANGE AS A NETWORK: HOW OUR GLOBAL COMMUNITY FUNCTIONS

• The Life of Our Chapters -> the lifecycle of our chapters, our regions, squads and communication

• Taking Decisions as a Community -> the legislative assembly, the legislative meeting and our constitution

• oikos International and the Community -> roles, responsibilities and how we support our chapters

• Our Alumni -> what happens when oikees graduate

THE OIKOS INTERNATIONAL TEAM – TENDING THE OIKOS COMMUNITY

• Working as a Team -> learn about our team structure, how we work together, when and where we meet, how we communicate, how we plan and trace our impact

• Operating oikos International -> how we do Human Relations, Team Development, Organisational Development, Legal Matters, Communication & Branding, IT & Data Management, Fundraising & Managing Financial Resources

STAYING CONNECTED – OUR WIDER NETWORK

• Our Advisors, Our Partners & The University Ecosystem -> how we connect with our network

• Glossary & FAQ -> tips and tricks for navigating this guideline

Do you have any feedback or find bugs/errors in the guideline? Anything we did not mention yet? We would love to read from you in our feedback/bug form!

Any further questions? Contact us! info@oikos-international.org www.oikos.world

In order to contribute to the change we envision, we focus on empowering and encouraging student change agents and actively creating shifts in the way we learn and teach, while spreading awareness for sustainability through our actions. More details on specific initiatives of oikos international can be found below. You can learn more about our strategic thoughts here - the way we approach strategy is highly agile and reflects developments in real time. Our Impact Matrix helps us to coordinate, track and trace the impact of our work, both in chapters & on the international level.

How we tend the community at oikos International

On the international level, we see our strongest contribution in supporting the work on the ground, therefore we focus on tending and supporting this community of student change agents in several different ways. Our work in leadership, community and transforming education is strongly related in one joint narrative: Our times call for a new generation of relational leadership. We at oikos help students to grow and develop the competencies needed to navigate complexity. The link to our work on the education system is that we see our universities and business schools as great places to foster these competencies and to support individuals in becoming sustainability leaders with a better understanding of themselves and the world around them. We accompany them in the process, both on the individual and the institutional level. As the students venture out to bring change to their own university ecosystem, they grow and develop and practice what they preach.

Climate change, drastic biodiversity decline, poverty, hunger, inequality, mass migration: these are only some examples of the sustainability challenges our world is facing at the moment. To move ahead on the path towards sustainability, we all have to act together and rethink the ways we think, create and interact as a society. Sustainable development is at the core of oikos’ purpose – and more specifically the sustainable development and transformation of the higher education system. We see a need to change how we understand, teach, learn and use economics and management for the good of people and the planet. Aiming to contribute to this transformation, a critical question that needs to be asked is: how do we define sustainability and inspire tangible, strategic action that shifts our unsustainable course? Here’s our sustainability definition with more background information.

The meaning of the word oikos highlights how we perceive our purpose in the world: oikos has multiple meanings which connect tightly to the core of sustainability and how our society works. Most of us are familiar with the prefix “ecos.” It sums up images of Earth, and forms the basis of words such as ecology, economics and ecosystem. They all share the same Greek root, ecos, derived from “oikos,” meaning “house or household’. The ancient Greek word oikos refers to three related but distinct concepts: the family, the family's property, and the house - in our words: home.

What a fitting name for a community that cares deeply for the fate of our common home, planet earth, and how we want to live together in the future, right? Beyond this, oikos feels like home to many of us - and is home to many innovative pathways to how we want to learn and lead together.

Do you have any feedback or find bugs/errors in the guideline? Anything we did not mention yet? We would love to read from you in our feedback/bug form!

Any further questions? Contact us! info@oikos-international.org www.oikos.world

What has remained at the core of oikos is our ambition to work with people in collaborative ways (you could call that whole-person learning, participatory or service learning, amongst others), and the perception of higher education as a fundamental puzzle piece for addressing the global sustainability challenges.

One question we keep asking ourselves, and that deserves continuous reflection and consideration is: Why the focus on economics and management education? Why not only sustainability? Whenever an oikee raises this question, we surely can point back to our origins, where oikos was founded with an attempt to rejoin ecology and economy for the good of people and planet. After years of acting and thinking, our understanding of sustainability is broader (see ). And we don't want to attach to this focus just because of history. Yet, from a perspective of our identity and the leverage point economics and management & economics provide, this is where we can have a lot of impact, especially considering the transdisciplinarity, openness, and creativity our colorful community brings in. For oikos and many others, economics and management are two fields at the core of the needed transformations - and in particular the education in these fields. This is where we, on a higher level, aim to help shift the basic mode of operation onto a sustainable path - and thus stabilize our ecological and social systems.

Explore more on our history webpage & find out more about our history-related initiatives.

How do we lead together?

We are dedicated to empower our oikees in their change agent journey! Our leadership initiatives aim for the personal and professional development of our participants, equipping them with knowledge, tools, skills, capacities, traits and inner dimensions (mindset) to become conscious leaders who are proactive and capable of creating change towards sustainability and the well-being of people and planet. Our leadership development initiatives equip students & their allies with what they need to facilitate change in their environment:

The oikos Houses are multicultural clusters of chapters that are similar in size and timezone. One can think of fellow House chapters a bit like a family or a peer group, who are guided by a House Facilitator through the Chapter Pathways. In monthly calls, the oikos Houses offer a familiar space where chapter representatives receive and share information, ideas, tools, feedback and motivation with each other. Each chapter is invited to leverage the diversity of ideas in the hivemind by bringing questions or topics that concern their everyday work!

Find more details & the current regions & chapters in the House Field Guide (coming soon).

oikos International highly encourages cross-chapter and cross-regional activity. Therefore, we established our thematic layer with the option to form self-organized, theme-centred groups that allow individuals from across and beyond the community to come together and exchange and/or create. The shape of these so-called squads depends on the participants themselves. The squads are coordinated by François, who checks in with the existing squads, updates the website with current developments, ensures frequent communication and officially closes squads after they closed (for more detail see ).

Our international community of oikos chapters and oikees worldwide is what makes oikos as an organisation unique. Currently, the community is composed of 50 different chapters in over 27 countries, encompassing around 1000 active members. The impact and development of our local chapters can be traced in the . Our chapters find themselves in different stages, which we quickly describe here:

How we work with our global community

Being an association, and the chapters being the members, we have certain processes and decisions that need to be addressed in a rather formal way. This is done through the Legislative Assembly, composed of all chapters eligible to vote (full chapters). In general, the Board as a leading body of the organization (see chapter 4 of the constitution) is responsible for organizing the Legislative Meeting, the gathering of the Legislative Assembly, which usually happens twice a year. Preparations usually require 1-2 months and depend on the amount of voting items. The team that is in charge of the preparations of the Legislative Meeting usually consists of the co-president (most often the Chair of the meeting), and the VP of Legal Matters and/or other volunteers stepping into several different roles.

Find all details around the Legislative Assembly and legislative meetings in our Constitution (Article 8). Whereas this official document outlines the legally binding elements, there is no deeper insight into the process and the roles, as well as the opportunity this process brings to the community. In this document, you will find the responsible parties for organizing, facilitating and managing a smooth process of decision making. In comparison, the Legislative Assembly field guide elaborates what has to be done and how, so that decisions taken by the Legislative Assembly are legally binding.

The alumni network is an important part of our community. The alumni keep the oikos spirit alive and bring oikos’ values to the business and academic world. Every oikee automatically becomes an alumni after their active oikos time. We try to keep the alumni as connected to the community as possible by inviting them to our events, collaborating with them in projects or co-organizing alumni events. At oikos International, at least one board member (VP) actively dedicates time to the alumni network, and at the moment we have several volunteers contributing. For more information on alumni and how they are involved in oikos, see our Alumni landing page. In many cases, alumni gather and connect in self-organized ways on a regional level.

The purpose of the oiKosmos, our virtual community infrastructure, is to keep the community connected and updated, both concerning oikos International and themselves, so that our impact can thrive in and through relationships. It is about creating access to opportunities and giving way for both formal and informal conversation between the members of the network.

The oiKosmos consists of our public oiKosmos guide, a Miro board (Provides an overview & access to all oiKosmos elements, guidelines and relevant contacts, additionally to the newest information about oikos International and other opportunities, fun to navigate and accessible), a community Discord server (Gives oikos members and friends a chance to interact outside of programs and events, creates a space for exchange, meet and work online - also allows for private servers for chapters not managed by oikos International, chapter space template available), and the oikos Toolbox (all essential documents, guides, forms & marketing material for the daily life in the oikos community and oikos Chapters). The oiKosmos is maintained by the IT Manager and the Community Support/oiKosmos facilitator.

For more information about the oiKosmos and oiCoffee, please see the oiKosmos Field Guide or the oiKosmos Wiki.

Hosting and tending an international community is a big responsibility and learning opportunity for oikos International. Our international team of employees and (student) volunteers is all in for supporting the students on the ground with our initiatives, and by running and further developing the organization in the background.

oikos International is a complex organization with all our initiatives and other fields of action that pop up over the year. While some things seem to happen out of an unplanned cross-pollination of ideas and the ambition of individuals, there is a certain underlying structure to our more frequent initiatives and workflows.

Roles

One important element that helps coordinating the work and keeping the overview within the international team are roles: a granular set of responsibilities that belong to each other and that have been taken over by an individual, in agreement with the according sub-team. Roles help us as well to identify potential gaps and lacking capacity in the team, and they help us navigate the impact of our work. Moreover, the choice to use roles has been consciously made to have a clearer distinction between the responsibilities a person has at oikos and the individual behind it. A person can have several roles, which are summarized in each individual’s role wardrobe. Learn more about roles in the

On top of being either volunteers or employees, some members of the oikos international Team are elected by our community, which gives them some specific roles:

Decision-Making

Another critical element: our way of making decisions. Over the years, we discovered that this is a very difficult and fundamental topic for how we work together. At the core of our decision making is the assumption that people who own a role and who are directly affected by a decision should be involved in the decision. This happens through different forms of giving and asking for advice, depending on the scope of the decision. In general terms, we believe that every individual who follows through with an action has the agency to prepare and take an informed decision. On every level, we work with consent and critical objections to sharpen our decisions and stay in movement. Read more about our decision making in the .

Ever since January 2021, oikos has been operating as a fully remote organization. This means that the only place we share is our virtual zoom office. The zoom room with its several breakouts is hosted by different team members over the week and is freely accessible to the whole oikos network. There are other zoom accounts available for the team and community to host events and meetings, read more about it .

For our different teams, there are different meeting formats happening on a regular basis, which can be found in the .

In many aspects, every operational function and every initiative has developed their own, unique way of planning and tracking process and progress and there is a lot of cross-communication happening in places like the weekly or monthly meetings. We believe that this agility is fundamental to our success and deep change work. Nevertheless, in an effort to make our achievements and priorities more approachable, transparent and accessible in real-time, and to learn from current developments for our next steps, we currently introduce the strategic impact matrix (see field guide & website). The matrix primarily should be seen as an accountability and planning tool that helps the team to check in with each other and with focus on the different workstreams.

We mainly communicate via the software tool Google Chat on an individual level and use google rooms regarding topics that concern the whole team. Emails are our choice whenever someone external is involved and our WhatsApp groups are the place to drop casual jokes, pictures and important reminders. Learn more about the details in the communications field guide.

Being, learning and leading in community

Since the beginning, oikos International has been tending spaces to get together, exchange perspectives, and learn from and with each other. The intercultural & intergenerational experiences of oikees worldwide feed into a richness of stories & memories. Together, we weave a support network that we draw on for years to come, fueling critical relationships & our energy for our work in the world.

International Chapter Conference - The International Chapter Conference is an annual on-site conference, hosted and developed by one or a small group of local chapters. oikos International supports the chapter team and contributes to the program with community building activities that help the participants to connect and get inspired for the opportunities within the network (so-called Community Gatherings)

Chapter Pathways Initiative - Our chapters are accompanied on their journey through the semester, both by their fellow chapters and oikos International. Chapter Pathways enables us to accompany each chapter individually, yet together through a core journey (semester kick-off, regional calls, semester reflections), 1-on-1 check-ins and the possibility to get a chapter coach.

oikos Squads - Our Squads are the perfect opportunity to connect with other international students and start a conversation, project, or any other format in the fields you are interested in. Squads are self-organized and can use other oikos International platforms to come together (eg. oikos Camp).

Alumni gatherings - Our alumni are a valuable part of our community. In a mostly self-organised way, the oikos alumni gather on a local or more international level to stay in touch and exchange on topics relevant for them. The events are always open to current oikees. Current examples: the Unconference.

AGORA (formerly Community Hours) - The oikos AGORA is our virtual market place where anyone from the community is invited to join. It's a online meet-up space happening twice a month on Tuesdays and always has a topic at its heart. Anyone can host an AGORA.

Past/on hold:

Future Lab - The FutureLab is a conference that invites oikees & friends of the community into exploration, co-creation and exchange over a certain question that is put at the center. After 10 years, the FutureLab will soon be fully organized by volunteers from the community. oikos International supports future the volunteer team and contributes to the program with community building activities that help the participants to connect and get inspired for the opportunities within the network (so-called Community Gatherings)

How do we learn together?

What do we learn, how do we learn it? How and by whom are these decisions made, and how often are they revised? Our students are important drivers in their university ecosystems and have direct influence on their campus and beyond. And: they write stories about how they co-create change on the ground. In order to support the local efforts, oikos International creates several platforms to exchange, learn from cultural differences & success stories, and opens spaces where students and their allies can craft future pathways together.

Transforming Education Squad - The TE Squad is a monthly online gathering of chapter members and other students working on curriculum change at the local level. They share experiences, ideas, and resources. They alternate between theoretical (Doughnut Economics, Degrowth, etc) and methodological/strategic topics (how to do a student survey, how to encourage participation online, etc).

oikos Academy Open Evenings - The oikos Academy is a format for students and early career researchers developed and facilitated by oikos student members. Together, we reflect and learn about the current developments in business and economics education, and the status quo of sustainability integration.

oikos Camp - the camp is an on-site gathering for teams working on projects related to sustainability in economics and business education. At Camp, teams have a chance to develop their skills and focus on their projects, while getting inspired by their peers and making use of the cross-pollination of ideas.

oiCases (In review) - Our plan is to connect the heritage of a case competition run for over 20 years with our future-oriented work and the stories that students write on the ground. In one direction, the old cases invite users to study sustainable development in real time, in the other, we will rewrite the meaning of cases within oikos & the world of business education by establishing a practice of collective storytelling.

Positive Impact Rating - The Positive Impact Rating (PIR) is a business school rating conducted by students and for students. Students coordinate a rating survey that asks students 20 questions in seven relevant impact dimensions. oikos was part of the design of the PIR and continues to closely support the initiative. The most recent edition involved several oikos Chapters - see the report here.

oikos International and its international team of employees and volunteers acts as an umbrella organisation to connect and support the whole oikos community. The reciprocal relationship between the chapters/the community and the oikos International becomes visible in the different responsibilities listed below:

How we coordinate our support to the chapters

Our Chapter Development Team coordinates and facilitates our efforts to accompany our local Chapters. They create new and implement existing Chapter Development Initiatives that tangibly support the creation of a strong and impactful community. We work in four main areas with four different teams through its various activities: oikos Expedition, New chapter applications & membership, Chapter Pathways Initiative (including regional activities) and Community building. See chapter development field guide.

oikos International is an umbrella organisation for all oikos chapters, while each chapter is an important part of our global community. oikos International is mainly connected to the chapters through representatives from each individual chapter. Through our initiatives and the oikosmos, we strive to build further connections and relationships.

Our organization wouldn’t function without the support of several operational sub-teams. Together, they ensure that all legal requirements are met, all initiatives are well-communicated and, most importantly, that all people feel cared for. Here a summary about how we tend these different operational fields that help us to run oikos International:

Internal activities related to Human Relations (HR), Team Development (TD) and Organizational Development (OD) are essential for oikos International. For us, people are at the core of what we do. This is why we want to put a lot of emphasis on health, wellbeing and development. The efforts of the HR/TD/OD sub-team are driven by a desire to create opportunities that nurture our team, and also to lead by example: we wish to be the pioneers and learn from pioneers, also to inspire our chapters. This also means to reinvent ourselves and develop our organization and our way of working together, in short: organizational development. We are working passionately to find courageous ways to (re)structure our team and organization so we can more diligently and joyfully live up to our purpose. This includes, but is not limited to more decentralized, self-organized ways of working, increasing the agility of our governance structure and making space for our people to show up as whole human beings.

We wish to offer and nurture an environment and culture at work in which employees and volunteers have fun and feel at ease, comfortable and like they can voice their opinions or initiate ideas or projects. Our organisational mission of empowering students applies also to our own team. Fair compensation for our work, healthy working hours and working time, regular individual calls in order to check in on everyone’s well being, be it at work or at home, are topics we currently work on.

We put in place several spaces and habits that are designed to nurture a healthy work culture. Examples are the Feedback Fika to ask for feedback, or casual Google chat rooms, e.g. dedicated to anything we want to celebrate or to share experiences. Find the field guides .

As oikos keeps evolving as a community, but also regarding our in-house initiatives, partnerships and alumni, the development needs to be accompanied by clear and vibrant communication. We want to powerfully tell our stories and create outstanding recognizability of the oikos brand. Communicating about all we are and all we do is very complex and has high potential in leveraging our efforts to move towards our vision.

Why is communication important?

In the world of today, precise communication that speaks to the receiver is crucial to remain visible and relevant in the sea of information we are constantly exposed to. Our work is people-oriented, and we want to inspire as many observers as possible to become a part of the change, demanding and driving transformation towards sustainability. Our stories have the potential to touch people.

Who do we communicate to, and what are our objectives?

As our activities aim to prepare and encourage student-change agents to take part and write their own stories, the aim of our communication is to reach students worldwide, as well as further players in our ecosystem: academia, other organizations in the field of sustainability and (potential) institutional partners, but also the general public. Objectives range from simply raising awareness on our issues and opportunities, to getting them actively involved or supporting us in what we do or just sharing our story.

How do we communicate?

On the international level, we use several channels to communicate. On social media we have a diverse audience across different channels which allows for a greater reach when aiming at the general public, but also more effectiveness when addressing a specific target group (learn more ).

The newsletter is a monthly publication with all of the news from the previous month and announcements of upcoming events and projects by oikos International, our chapters and our partners.

We invite inspiring individuals from across all sectors to join our advisory council. The advisors help us explore strategic directions, provide feedback to individual inquiries and link us to helpful contacts, mainly through individual advice and in the bi-annual advisor sessions. There are no thematic roles appointed to advisors, whereas some of them with certainty bring expertise in particular fields (see short bios on the website). Having experience and a history of oikos in general is a big asset within the advisory council.

The level of commitment of advisors differs and should be clarified every year. Advisors mainly work with board members, who facilitate the exchange with the rest of the team.

After a 3-years term, advisors can be re-appointed by the board. Learn more about the processes in the advisory council field guide and check out the current advisors on the website.

In order to run an organization of such an international scope, we need and have a clearly structured practice of financial management. This is how we handle the financial resources of oikos International, budgeting, accounting and reporting.

In general, we count on all team members of oikos International to make financial decisions based on good judgement and ethical standards. They are also obliged to avoid potential conflict of interest (read more in the field guide). All revenues & expenses have to be recorded in the oikos International budget and the accounting of the year they occurred. We strive to set a sign by working with more sustainable finance alternatives.

Our balance sheet of explanations

Learn more about our accounts, and financial practices in the Finance Field Guide

Having the vision of transformed higher education, it is vital to oikos to nurture our relationships to the university ecosystem with and beyond our chapters. There are several ways we are in touch and get to work with faculties all across the world:

• Contacts through chapter presence: a local presence enables us to directly reach out to faculty on the ground

• Alumni in universities: there are several oikees who have chosen to follow an academic career path. Pointing out alumni in institutions often is a helpful first step to establish further connections.

• Individual contacts: It happens relatively often that we get contacted by or casually connected to faculty who are interested in our cause and very positive about supporting it. This is a very valuable resource.

• Through partner networks: partners like PRME, or the GRLI offer a whole international network of ambitious and supportive faculty. Beyond scope for local collaboration, there is scope for reaching out and getting some diverse perspectives in.

We give our best to maintain a list with all recent contact points, which is maintained by xxx

Sustainability as a movement is picking up pace and we are certainly not alone in the strive for a more just and sustainable world. On our way, we deem it very important to join forces, exchange perspectives, receive and offer support to like-minded organizations and individuals. It is important for us to maintain a friendly, open-minded, learning-oriented relationship with everyone we partner up with - and this is also one criterion for us to enter a partnership or not.

Beyond that, partner organizations/individuals should align with our ethical guideline and respect the planetary boundaries in their work (see sustainability definition). It also must be clear how they strive to work towards sustainability, and how working together can bring value to everyone involved. Of course, there are different reasons and functions a partnership can address. Therefore, we introduced a threefold differentiation to clarify how we work together:

How do we coordinate partnerships

Partnerships require internal cooperation between several team members, depending on the individual case. A process from initial contact to the manifestation of a partnership (eg. in a MOU) can vary from 1 call to 2 years. partnerships currently are rather established based on eed ( of team or community) and/or chance/exploration in a certain moment where we meet a new potential partner through other friends of ours. It is mainly the president & board member(s) with the partnership role(s) who steward the processes, involving other team members if needed or helpful. We coordinate partnerships with the help of the partnership list and our CRM system salesforce. There, you can also find potential partners and other partnership opportunities. The partnership domain is being revised and updated beginning of 2022, being further developed with trainings and tools for the team. Learn more in the partnership field guide

The oikos International team is a very colorful, international group of people that comes together to support the oikos community in multiple ways. The oikos International team includes all volunteers and employees that follow a commitment for oikos International. Their commitments differ concerning time and width of involvement. Find the current team members here. Learn more about how we coordinate and focus on human relations here.

How can we visualise how we organise in oikos International?

Recently, we have spent a lot of time reflecting on our team structure. Coming up with a one that represents how we relate and interact with each other is important, because it helps us to increase our collective awareness and collaborate even more meaningfully. Inspired by theories of self-organizing such as Holacracy, Sociocracy and Reinventing Organizations, we co-created the following team structure:

This might not look quite like the pyramidal shapes you are used to. In our organization chart, you see differently sized & coloured circles that can serve us as a map as to how the oikos International Team works and relates.

The circles you see in our diagram encompass sets of roles that belong to each other. Roles are formed out of a set of tasks that go together (see more in How We Work Together). By owning a role in a circle, a person becomes a member of the circle (in this sense, a circle is kind of like a team). We use several colors in our diagram to indicate different kinds of roles within these circles. If you are wondering what this structure implies for our everyday work, check out our user guide!

IT and data management are at the core of a functioning remote organization and it keeps our community connected. The topic for us includes the management of hardware & software used in the international team & oikos community, as well as specific projects (eg. new website) and the facilitation of resources provided to the community (eg. the oiKosmos). Find more detail in the IT field guide.

As oikos International is a non-profit organization, fundraising is one of our key operational topics. We continuously offer our events and programs to our community members (mostly without a participants’ fee), therefore building up donor-grantee relationships with individuals, companies and foundations is an essential activity.

With many grants being specifically directed towards a certain event or initiative, the responsible persons for these initiatives usually also take a lead on grant applications and donor management.

The co-presidents are constantly involved in these efforts and take care that the energy directed to the topic brings the outcome we aim at. Additionally, we have one board member who focuses on new and old fundraising activities and our overall fundraising strategy. This person is stewarding our fundraising volunteers.

In 2021, we introduced the Finance & Fundraising Circle which is helping us to coordinate all we do in fundraising with all of our initiatives and for oikos as a whole. In our bi-monthly meetings, we get together to exchange with (min. 1) representative per sub-team, talking about current developments, opportunities and things we want to work on.

In a supportive role, several fundraising volunteers are focussing on topics like foundation & private donor process support (scanning & contacting potential donors), alternative fundraising (all approaches beyond the traditional foundation-approach, eg. crowdsourcing & philanthrophy) and supporting grant applications of the initiatives in the process.

Being a swiss association with international membership, it is important to be very clear about our legal situation and have our allies in the field.

How we address legal questions

Every now and then, we stumble upon legal questions that affect either us as a Swiss association in the context of an employer, or an international network with membership organizations. Our main approach is to gather all of our questions on the following list and, one after another, prioritized by urgency and importance, reach out to our pro bono partners to address them.

Who’s responsible for legal matters and where do we get help?

Currently, the Vice President in charge of Legal Matters (and his/her team) is responsible for the modification and general overview of the legal documents that are supporting the legal basis of our organization, and for addressing legal questions. This person doesn’t need to have specific knowledge or practice law, but rather maintain contact with the experts in the field, always looking for advice and support if needed.

Our partners in the Law Clinic and others are there to support us on a pro bono basis. They help through thoroughly reviewing legal documents and finding answers to relevant questions based on Swiss and/or International law. See legal matters field guide.