To Merge or Collaborate - Why and How? - An Almshouse Toolkit

Welcome to 2021. The new year has started with another lockdown but this provides us all with the opportunity to take a moment to sit down and truly plan for the future. You will no doubt have measures in place for the day-to-day management of your almshouses over the next few weeks (we have, after all, been here before) but what of your essential strategic plans?

Stone King LLP and The Trust Partnership invite you to join our fourth webinar in our series providing almshouse charities with legal guidance and practical tips. Last year’s webinars focussed on the practical issues needed to deal with the challenges we saw during the year. In this webinar we will be focussing on how to plan your future strategy. We anticipate that many of you will be thinking about the pros and cons of collaborative working and the last year has seen lots of success stories in relation to charity collaborations. Collaboration may also often the first step towards merger. The best mergers are those that are based upon a strategic decision, where the merging charities seek to consolidate as opposed to achieve a takeover, and they therefore need careful planning and an understanding of the practical and legal issues that may arise. In this webinar, Tim Rutherford (Head of the Charity and Social Enterprise Sector Group at Stone King) and Elizabeth Fathi (Director of Almshouses at the Trust Partnership) will combine their extensive knowledge and experience of almshouses to present Part Four: To merge or collaborate – why and how?

The webinar will cover:

• The rationale for merger
• The strategy to find a merger partner
• The process – what to expect, what to negotiate and what to leave behind
• Collaboration – an alternative to merger?
• Looking back, reflections on the lessons learned from 2020