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What Is a “Community Interest Company”?

What’s the difference between a charity and a CIC (Community Interest Company)? As you can tell by the name, a CIC is a company set up to do something that benefits the community; it's not a commercial company like Tesco or Microsoft. There are two kinds of CIC – one is quite rare so we'll pass over it. GoSafer.Online belongs to the other category of CICs: "limited by guarantee".

A Limited By Guarantee company doesn't have any shareholder owners who receive a share of its profits. Profits have to stay within the company. They can only be invested to support the stated purposes of the company. In most other ways, running of a CIC is very similar to running a company. So it's easier for people with business experience to get the CIC started and running effectively.