El reto
Reuse and preparation for reuse are key to moving towards a circular economy model, but the sector was made up of a diverse mix of administrations, social organisations, companies and initiatives with different experience and different ways of operating.
The Agència de Residus de Catalunya proposed creating an Association of Reuse Centres of Catalonia as a shared space to structure the sector, share knowledge, drive projects forward and strengthen its capacity to influence policy.
The challenge wasn’t just creating a new legal entity. Its foundations had to be built jointly, with every decision owned by the future members so it could later be carried over into the statutes and the documents needed to formally set up the association.
The challenge was turning a shared will into an organisation able to actually function.
Project development
Spora designed and facilitated a participatory working process that combined technical preparation, collaborative work, weighing up alternatives, and decision-making.
1. Building the starting framework. We worked with the Agència de Residus de Catalunya on the initial definition of the association and of reuse centres, and identified the main issues that needed resolving to make the future organisation viable.
2. Facilitating the working sessions. We prepared specific sessions to work through each block of decisions and let participants contribute, propose amendments and reach agreements.
The process included group work, presenting proposals, collective discussion, voting systems, and spaces for debate and consensus.
3. Defining the associative model. We worked through and pinned down the association’s objectives, its activities and services, member categories, access requirements, governance structure, voting system and membership-fee system.
4. Formalisation and incorporation. The decisions taken were carried over into the documentation needed to move the association towards formal incorporation: statutes, the governance structure, the fee system, representation criteria, membership documentation, and the elements needed for the founding deed.
Results
The process made it possible to establish the organisational and operational foundations of the future association:
- A shared definition of a reuse centre.
- Definition of the association’s objectives.
- Identifying the activities and services to be developed.
- Defining member categories and access requirements.
- Designing the governance structure.
- Defining the roles of the General Assembly and the Board.
- Defining the leadership role and how the technical committees would work.
- Proposing and validating the fee system.
- Defining the voting system.
The statutes ended up describing an association open to Catalan local authorities, for-profit private entities and non-profit private entities, with specific requirements tied to operating, managing or developing reuse centres.
An activity model was also defined that went beyond sector representation: an internal network, knowledge transfer, training and advice, studies and projects, outreach, joint purchasing, fundraising, and developing shared tools.
Conclusions
Setting up a sector-wide association takes much more than drafting a set of statutes. It requires building an organisational architecture that the people who will have to sustain it actually share.
That’s why the project was approached as a working process, not a closed proposal. Spora contributed technical knowledge, structured the areas requiring decisions, and designed the dynamics that let different stakeholders test their views against each other and turn them into agreements.
This methodology made it possible to tackle particularly sensitive issues through debate and shared construction.
The project left behind an organisational foundation ready to give the reuse sector in Catalonia structure and working capacity, with a shared definition of its scope of action and the services the association needed to offer its members.
Lessons learned
- Building a network means giving it structure. A sector-wide network doesn’t come together just by putting stakeholders in touch with each other. It needs shared objectives, useful services, participation mechanisms, and a structure capable of making decisions.
- Disagreements are part of the design too. On issues like the statutes, the voting system or membership fees, differing perspectives are part of the problem that needs solving. The participatory process turned them into concrete proposals and put them up for debate.
- Technical knowledge should make agreement easier. Spora’s role wasn’t to make decisions on behalf of the future members, but to bring judgement, prepare alternatives, and create the conditions for decisions to be made with enough information.
- An association needs to be useful from day one. That’s why the work wasn’t limited to defining governance bodies. Concrete services were also defined: knowledge transfer, advice, training, studies, fundraising, outreach, and shared tools.