In 2022, eight organisations came together - curated and hosted by Beyond the Rules - to explore how we might reimagine, and rewire employment contracts together. All organisations were already exploring this question in their settings in different ways and with varying progress; the space enabled us to share practice and possibility in a way that has since been codified into the Example contract and resources that you will find in this portal.

<aside> 📌 The organisations were:

Healing Justice London

Collaborative Future

Civic Square

Huddlecraft

Chayn

Catalyst

Maia

Dark Matter Labs

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Supported by Legal Design from Angela Tang, legal advice from Bates Wells, facilitation and curation by Annette Dhami and Anna Rosero and strategic design by Calvin Po at Dark Matter Labs, we spent 6 hours together exploring these questions. Some broad principles began to emerge from the group, which we tried to capture and which informed the design of the contracting work.

Examples and specifics were incorporated into the resources shared in the Portal, where the groups were excited to share them openly.

Screenshot for the Miro board used during the peer group sessions

It was a rich process of deep sharing around a knotty technical question and we learned that:

• There is clear value for all parties in having this kind of space to raise and explore the practical and philosophical questions behind how we organise and govern.
• Having legal advice in the room for a topic like this was hugely valuable.
• To get the most from the session, a fair amount of preparation, facilitation and sense-making was needed in between.
• We would include additional practical days to get work done together if we did this again, and hope to still organise these in the future.

We encourage others to explore hosting groups of this nature and are happy to openly share resources and insights where helpful - you are welcome to contact [email protected].