Our Structure
The structure of an organization shapes the work it does. We’re building SRA so the structure and the practice say the same thing.
The School of Relational Arts is becoming a facilitator-owned cooperative — an organization owned and governed by the people doing the work of holding containers, teaching practice, and stewarding the community.
We use the word becoming deliberately. The cooperative is being built in the open, alongside the platform itself. Today, SRA operates under a transitional legal form while founding members, bylaws, and governance practices take shape. The full conversion to a registered cooperative is planned within the first year of operation.
This page exists so anyone curious about how SRA is built — participants, facilitators, the broadly curious — can read the answer plainly.
What This Means
Every facilitator who runs sessions on the platform is eligible to become a member of the cooperative — a co-owner with one vote, a share in any annual surplus proportional to their work, and a voice in how SRA is run. Membership requires no buy-in capital. The membership share is symbolic; what earns it is the work itself.
Decisions are made democratically. Time on the platform, sessions facilitated, or seniority of any kind do not buy more say. We use consent-based governance — closer in spirit to consensus than to majority rule, but workable at scale — through small accountable circles that hold authority over their domains.
A small Stewardship Trust holds a permanent mission share. The Trust has no economic rights and no day-to-day decision-making power; its only function is to prevent SRA from ever being sold to outside investors, dissolved as a cooperative, or stripped of its egalitarian governance. The structure is built to outlast any single person, including the founder.
A Participant Council of eight to twelve people, drawn from the active participant base, holds a structured consultation right on decisions that affect participant experience. The Council does not have a statutory vote — facilitator-members govern the cooperative — but its role is real and its perspective is consulted on questions of pricing, container care, accessibility, and platform direction.
Members see the books. The revenue split between facilitator and platform is published. Annual financial reporting goes to all members and is shared in summary form with the broader community. Privacy applies to people; transparency is the working norm for operations.
The Economic Picture
Eighty percent of every session goes to the facilitator who held it. The remaining twenty percent supports the cooperative — covering hosting, payment processing, tax compliance and insurance, a Solidarity Fund for hardship and scholarships, and an annual surplus distributed to facilitator-members in proportion to their work that year.
The split is generous to facilitators by design and at the upper edge of what a cooperative can sustain. Most platforms in this space take twenty-five to forty percent; we take twenty. The first general meeting of the cooperative will revisit the split with real operating data, and the membership will decide together whether to adjust it.
Where We Are
SRA is headquartered in British Columbia, Canada, and will operate as a registered cooperative under BC’s Cooperative Association Act. International facilitators are welcome as members; the legal structure accommodates members anywhere in the world.
The cooperative will be incorporated formally once founding bylaws are drafted with the founding facilitator cohort, governance practices have been rehearsed, and the legal scaffolding is in place. We expect this to take six to twelve months from the start of the platform’s operation.
In the meantime, SRA operates with the cooperative as its declared destination. Early facilitators are independent practitioners running sessions on the platform under a clear written agreement, with the understanding that membership in the cooperative is the structural endpoint we are working toward together.
The work of relational practice is, finally, the work of building something together. We hope SRA’s structure can reflect that.
Questions about how SRA is built, or about becoming part of it as a facilitator?
Reach out.