Most agencies are pyramids. A few owners at the top with salaried staff doing the work and the gap between client pay and what workers earn is where the owners' personal wealth comes from. That whole structure rewards owning the brand over doing the work and that ain't this.
AWIP is set up so the people doing the work get paid for the work they do. If you want to take on more, you earn more. If you want to take on less, you earn less. There is no salary trap, no career ladder to climb to be respected, no manager assigning projects you hate and rob you of dignity. The trade-off is transparent. You're not insulated from a slow month, which is why this network funds a set of protections that an individual freelancer won't have.
What follows is how the money flows, who decides what, and how you come in and out.
Clients sign with AWIP, not with you personally. AWIP holds the bank account, VAT registration, contracts, brand, methodology, professional indemnity insurance, shared tooling and resources. When a project lands, the money is split three ways.
The levy pays for things you don't want to or can't be doing yourself: the website, the marketing that brings the work in, the legal, accounting, tooling, peer review etc. It also funds some protections in the next section.
The origination fee comes off the top for whoever sourced the client. In practice that's usually me, since selling is mostly what I do. If you brought the client in yourself, that 12% stays in the project pot for you to keep or share with whoever else is delivering.
The remaining 68% (or 80% on a client you sourced yourself) goes to the people delivering the work, split however the project team agrees in advance.
Nothing about this is negotiated retroactively. The split is agreed in writing before the project starts. If you want to know what you'll take home from a piece of work, you can do the maths on the brief.
The shared infrastructure is the easy half. Brand, marketing, sales, admin, insurance, legal advice, methodology, peer review.
The harder half is what prevents this from becoming gig work and exploitation. The levy funds a sick pay pool members can draw from when they can't work, a sabbatical fund that lets people take a real break every few years without losing income, and training budget so the network keeps getting sharper. The exact rules for each are set by the members.
If the levy ever produces a surplus beyond what these need, it gets returned to members or rolled into something the membership decides is worth funding.
Decisions about your own client work are yours. How you structure the project, what you charge (within agreed minimums), who you bring in to help, what your day looks like. There will be no committee approving your work, slide decks, actions etc.
Decisions about the network are made together by consent. That covers levy rate, what the levy funds, who joins, how disputes get resolved, brand direction and ethics calls when a borderline client comes in. Consent means a decision goes ahead if no member has a principled objection. It is not majority voting. If you have a reason against, you say it, and we work through it until either you're satisfied or your objection is shown not to hold. This is slower than voting but it produces better decisions.
The one exception sits with me as founding steward. I hold a very narrow veto on questions of mission, brand integrity, and ethics. I cannot direct your work, I can't decide who joins, I can't change the levy, I can't take a bigger cut than anyone else for delivery work I do. What I can do is stop a decision that I think would compromise what AWIP is for. I expect to use this approximately never. It exists only so the project can't be redirected into something it was never meant to be.
Membership is through invitation, then probation, then consent.
You come in as an associate first. You take work through the network, get paid on the same split as a full member would, and we work together on a handful of projects so everyone gets a sense of fit. Six months is pretty typical.
After that, current members decide by consent whether to make you a full member. That decision is made through competence, ethics fit, and whether the other members already here want to share a working life with you. You might be told no.
Politically, the network sits on the left. If you think markets sort everything out or that workers are interchangeable and exploitable, this isn't the right place for you and you'll be happier elsewhere. I vet every prospective associate personally before the rest of the network meets them and that is not going to change.
Easy in, easy out. You give three months' notice. You keep any client relationships you brought in with you, and you keep any direct relationships you built with AWIP clients who'd rather follow you than stay with the network. There's no pay-out for "your share" of anything, because there isn't a share to pay out. This is not an equity model.
It isn't a co-op in the strict legal sense, though it borrows from that tradition. It isn't a partnership in which you bear unlimited liability. It isn't a way to get rich and it isn't a place to hide. The entire point is to be paid honestly for honest work, with a small group of people whose company you respect, on projects whose outcomes you can defend, and to mitigate some of the worst parts of being a solo practitioner whilst letting you keep the independence and the craft.
