Tools for people who are organising together

Co-ops, unions, tenant groups, mutual aid networks, campaigners, parish and community groups. Everything here is free, in plain English, and yours to copy, adapt and pass on. No sign-up. No paywall. No tracking.

Most of what stops small groups getting things done is not money. It is paperwork: the model rules nobody has time to read, the rent-increase letter nobody knows how to word, the pricing decision nobody wants to make alone. These tools exist to close that gap.

Start here

• Starting a farm co-op or a CSA Available Ireland. What each legal structure actually costs, how CSAs are really priced, what grants exist, and the four questions that decide whether scheme money is open to your holding at all. Read the farm co-op and CSA guide.
• Who owns the land? Available Four ways to share ground between people — undivided shares, split sites, a body that owns it, or long leases — and the real tax bill on each. Includes what it costs to gift a site to someone who is not family. Read the land-sharing guide.
• Starting a worker co-op Available The decisions you must make before you write anything down, the small set of documents that follow from them, and what registration costs. Read the worker co-op guide.
• Running a pay-what-you-can shop Available Sliding-scale pricing that works, and the three ways it goes wrong: how to set the tiers, and what to say on the page. Read the pay-what-you-can guide.

All the tools

Running the co-op

• Run your own co-op marketplace Available A booking platform for a worker-owned co-op doing deliveries, rides and repairs: customers request a job, members offer a price, the money is split by a rule the membership votes on, and every member can read the books. The code, the deployment guide, the operating rules and 53 end-to-end tests. Self-hosted, no commission, no investors. Read the co-op marketplace pack.

Money, grants and schemes

• Farm scheme eligibility: the four questions Available The questions that decide whether farm-scheme money is open to a holding at all — hectares, herd number, entitlements, and what you produce. Answer them in five minutes before you plan anything. Read the eligibility check.
• Before you apply: the grant pre-check Available The questions every rural funder asks before you write an application — applicant, match funding, planning evidence, procurement, timelines. Fill it in before you ring your Local Action Group. Read the grant pre-check.
• What it costs to register a co-op or a company Available Ireland. Plain fee tables for the co-operative route and the company limited by guarantee route, what each one files every year, and why the audit is the cost people forget. Read the registration fee tables.
• Who owns the farm business? Available A co-operative, a CSA and a farm partnership are three different things that people constantly confuse — and the difference changes what you can claim. Read the ownership explainer.

Land and shared ownership

• Co-ownership agreement: template Available A fill-in agreement for people owning shares in the same piece of land: who may sell and to whom, how the price is set, what happens on death, and how a deadlock breaks. Read the co-ownership template.
• Long site lease: template Available A 99-year ground lease for a site on someone else's land — rent, term, building obligations, repairs, insurance, exit and disputes. The cheaper alternative to giving land away, and the clauses that actually get used. Read the site lease template.
• What Cloughjordan teaches you about shared land Available Ireland's first ecovillage: the structure, the money, the ten-year timeline, and the common-land argument that outlasted the building work. Read it before you commit. Read the Cloughjordan case study.

Tenants and housing

• Tenant groups: tracking rent increases Available How one household's problem becomes evidence a group can use. A shared record per home per increase, a copy-paste template, the current rules on what an increase is allowed to be, a six-step escalation to the RTB, and the privacy rules for keeping a list of who rents what. Read the rent increase tracker.

Community energy and shared costs

• Community energy co-op dashboard Available Works out who put in what and who used what, and turns it into a split a committee can defend to its members. A single file you open in any browser — it works offline, keeps the data on your own machine, and exports a CSV for the minutes. Read the guide and open the dashboard — also in Gaeilge, Español and Français.

Running the group

• Co-op governance pack Available Rules that let a group disagree and still decide: a fill-in model-rules skeleton, one-member-one-vote as an actual procedure, what the chair, secretary and treasurer each must do (and must not), a dispute process that suspends power instead of expelling people, and the annual cycle. Read the governance pack.
• CSA members' agreement Available A fill-in-the-blanks agreement for a community supported agriculture scheme: what a share buys, the season, collection, how risk is shared, and how people leave without wrecking the year. Read the CSA members' agreement.
• Digital hygiene for organisers Available A short, practical checklist for a group that handles other people's information — messaging, devices, shared accounts, and what to do if something leaks. Read the digital hygiene checklist.
• Commons licences, explained Available What it actually means to share your work and still keep it yours: licences versus assignment, permissive versus share-alike, and how to choose one in five minutes. Read the commons licences explainer.
• The organiser privacy kit Available The full kit behind the digital hygiene checklist: a threat-model worksheet, a data inventory you can actually maintain, Signal and device settings, account access, and a one-page pack for new members. Read the organiser privacy kit.
• Protestor information packs Available What to carry, who to call, how to keep evidence safe, and where the authoritative know-your-rights sources are for Ireland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland — with a printable one-pager. Read the protestor information packs.

Being written next

Two larger tools are on the list and neither of them is ready. They are named here so you know what is coming rather than waiting for something that is not: solidarity-fund crowdfunding rails (self-hosted fundraising pages with a public ledger and no platform cut), and a union rep pack. If one of these is what you actually need this month, say so at the address below — that moves it up the list.

Why free, and what you can do with it

Because a co-op that has not started yet has no money, and a tenant group facing eviction should not be paying a subscription to organise. These are cheap for us to produce and genuinely useful to you, so they are given away. If something here helps, pass it to another group — that is the whole distribution plan.

Who makes this

A small studio in the north-west of Ireland that builds software and runs its own operations on tools like these. Same people, same methods, no venture capital and nothing skimming a percentage off anybody's work.

Related projects

• Growers' Collective Prototype An open-source platform for a direct farm-to-consumer co-operative: produce listings, orders and payments. It is a working prototype rather than a live service, and its business plan and contributing guide are published in five languages. Growers' Collective on GitHub.
• Anticlamping Campaign A driver's-rights campaign about private clamping in Ireland: which companies operate, what the law says, and how the appeals process works. It argues that you are entitled to remove a clamp from your own car — read its own account of the legal position before acting on that, and read it before you pay a release fee. Visit anticlamping.com.

The licence: copy it, change it, pass it on

Everything here is free to use, copy, translate, print and hand out — including by organisations that charge for their own work. Two conditions: credit where it came from, and if you publish a changed version, it goes out under the same licence so the next group has the same freedom you had. Filling in a template for your own group is use, not publishing: your agreement and your minutes stay yours.

The written packs are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; the tools we publish as software, such as the energy dashboard, are AGPL v3 or later. Read the licence in plain English.

Get in touch

If a document here is wrong for your country, or a tool is missing and you need it, say so and it will be written. Suggestions and corrections are the point: hello@solidaritytools.com.