From the CIC chair

Greetings, noble cousins,

I have the honour of addressing you as the current chair of the board of directors of SCA ID CIC, the community interest company that was set up to support the affiliation of the SCA within the UK and Ireland.

We are not the SCA Inc. BoD. We have no power to change the rules in the way that the SCA Inc. BoD has. The CIC was set up primarily to provide insurance cover for SCA activities in the UK and Ireland as there was a significant concern that the SCA Inc. insurance policies were not appropriate for groups outside the US and Canada. As a result, the CIC’s sole purposes are to provide insurance and to implement and provide appropriate governance on any Crown/Coronet decisions on sanctions within the membership list.

Your membership fees primarily go to cover insurance costs and accountancy fees, and to provide a small reserve for things like legal advice (should we need it) and other out-of-game costs. For instance, we are currently looking at providing training towards health and safety certification for some of our cooks. Changes in the insurance market mean that going forward we will have to have separate policies for the UK and for Ireland and, as a result, our insurance costs have more than doubled this year. The membership fee is not being increased this year, but I’d like to encourage anyone who hasn’t joined SCA ID to do so.

The reason for this is that the insurance only covers all paid-up members of the SCA in the UK and Ireland. For those who play but are not actual members of the Society, the non-member surcharge at events will provide you with temporary membership for that event, but it would almost certainly work out cheaper for you in the long term just to join SCA ID. We are still working on the mechanism for this so please bear with us. The insurance covers us for Public Liability, Employer’s Liability, and for equestrian activities (UK only at present, Ireland will be added in future if needed) at events and practices.

Employer’s Liability is to cover any workers or volunteers who are working under the direction of an SCA ID member, who might sue SCA ID should they be injured in the course of the work. This cover is needed because in law, anyone to whom you give controlling directions, including a professional worker, can be regarded as your employee, even if for only a short time; it does not require any payment or contract for this relationship to exist in law, so any claim for alleged injury would be brought under the Employer’s Liability section of the policy, not Public Liability. Without this cover, the directing individual would have to deal with the claim, genuine or not, themselves.

In order to make sure that all of our events fall within the conditions of the insurance this means that we will have to do a bit more paperwork for SCA events in the UK and Ireland. All events must be signed off by the Seneschal of the organising branch in order to be covered by the insurance, and all named event staff (marshals, cook etc.) must be paid-up members of SCA ID. We will also need event stewards to file a formal risk assessment for each event (or one to cover a series of practices in a specific location) to bod-secretary@insulaedraconis.org before the event. A risk assessment checklist and related form will be available from the ID and Membermojo websites, or from the ID Seneschal.

I hope this information is useful and has answered some of the questions I’ve heard from people over the last few months. The SCA ID CIC AGM will take place online in September (date TBD) and I’d like to invite you to attend. We’ll also hold some “Meet the CIC BoD” sessions at events through the coming year. You can also contact me directly at bod-chair@insulaedraconis.org, but please remember that we can’t change the rules, just the insurance.

In service to Insulae Draconis,
Baronesa Ysabella-Maria de San Lazaro, O.P. (Nik Whitehead)