On Wednesday 1st July 2015 WWOOF UK moved office.
This was the end of an era and of a working partnership with Lowimpact.org – also known as LILI – Low Impact Living Initiative (we love acronyms here!) LILI have been running the WWOOF UK office since 2007 and now the same “WWOOF team” are employed directly by WWOOF UK.
Below are extracts from the blog of Dave Darby who is the director of Lowimpact.org having founded the organisation back in 2001.
“Lowimpact was born as LILI at Redfield Community in 2001, and our office was based there. I say was, because staff started to disperse several years ago, and now everyone is working remotely apart from two staff working on the WWOOF contract. Now those two have moved to an office in Buckingham, meaning that we don’t have a physical presence at Redfield Community any more.”
“So why the split? It started on Jan 1 this year, when changes in EU law meant that WWOOF could split its UK and overseas operations when it came to VAT – and that meant that they could de-register for VAT in the UK, because they fell below the VAT threshold for their UK operations alone. Lowimpact was still VAT-registered however, so we would have to charge VAT that they would no longer be able to claim back – resulting in a loss of around £16k per year. That wasn’t viable, obviously, so they had to start the move, reluctantly, towards taking it all in-house. Ironically, the loss of income from the WWOOF contract means that Lowimpact also fell below the threshold, and we’re no longer registered for VAT!”
In the rest of his blog Dave describes the background and history of the connection between WWOOF and LILI (and Redfield Community) You will also be treated to his vision of the future and a very warm appraisal of the joys of WWOOFing!
Read the blog in full at the Lowimpact website: http://www.lowimpact.org/goodbye-to-wwoof-and-to-redfield-community-the-dawn-of-a-new-era-for-lowimpact-org/
https://www.facebook.com/wwoofuk
