Digital 52 7️⃣ - Growing your coworking space for a more positive impact. A story around a circular economy, diversity, and inclusion with Impact Hub Berlin.
There is one thing coworking magically does: it brings people who share the same interest on a particular topic all under one roof. Imagine then what wonders happen when impact-driven entrepreneurs come together to build a better future for us all.
Meet Impact Hub Berlin!
Beyond Coworking - Community Curation - How to Start - Value Creation.
Read the story of Impact Hub Berlin on page 50 of "Around The World in 250 Coworking Spaces".
Out of all the spaces featured in the book, the one you are about to discover below is the space that introduced me to the wonders of coworking.
How so?
Back in 2014, before becoming part of the coworking world, I (Pauline) attended a social impact type of Hackathon in Berlin. The team at Impact Hub Berlin hosted the event in a space that wasn’t theirs, but somewhere to experiment. A few months later, when I had officially become the Chief Happiness Officer of a Berlin coworking space, I found out that Impact Hub Berlin had moved into a space just 4 minutes walking distance away from the space I was managing. Over the years, we’ve done quite a few things with Impact Hub Berlin, from events to sharing members. But what we’ve enjoyed the most, is watching them grow alongside their mission and vision to “provide impact-driven entrepreneurs with tailored support to realize, develop, and scale their impact.”; valuing trust, courage, and collaboration in all areas of the process. And while you might think of growth as square meters, we also mean growth in positive social impact in Berlin and beyond.
How did it all happen? That’s what you are about to find out in today’s story!
➡️ A little refresher
Who’s behind the featured space?
Meet Anna Lässer, Nele Kapretz, Leon Reiner and Martin Hobler.
The four Founders found each other several years ago on the Berlin social impact scene. Anna Lässer and Nele Kapretz met at the HPI D-School before meeting Leon Reiner and Martin Hobler who completed the founding quartet.
➡️ Key Figures
- Opening year: 2014
- Size when they started: 560 sqm (5,600 sqft)
- Size today: 3,500 sqm (35,000 sqft)
➡️ A little tour around Impact Hub Berlin
➡️ Behind-the-scenes
Things you didn't read in aw250cs
“Our design was co-created with our community from day one. A small group of architects known as LXSY who connected at our prototype space helped us bring to life our vision of a flexible and modular space where magic can happen. The result was that we won a German Design Award in 2017!”
"While we're expanding our capacity to have people back in the space in a physical sense, we're also expanding our capacity to really have more of a virtual offering for people who might not be with us every day."
Luke Davis, Communications Lead
➡️ Impact Hub Berlin Today
To prepare this edition of Digital 52, one early morning I interviewed Luke Davis, Communications Lead at Impact Hub Berlin. During the time of our interview, Impact Hub Berlin was not yet based in their new space, they were still in the process of building it and the approach they took to build their newest location is reminding me once again why I love Impact Hub Berlin so much: because they lead by example.
💫 New Space, Bigger Ambitions.
💬 What's new at Impact Hub Berlin since the last time we spoke?
Wow, that’s a big question! There has been a lot of new things since the last time that we spoke. It's also been a bit of a roller coaster. Like the rest of Berlin and a lot of the world, we had to struggle through the first part of 2020.
“March 2020 was the first time since our opening that we had to completely close our coworking space for a few months.”
We transitioned our work to digital, keeping our members happy in the virtual world, and luckily we were able to start a form of coworking space again not too long after.
It was a tricky task for our community team to keep up with the changing restrictions around what you can and can't do with offices and working spaces in the past two years. But they've done an amazing job.
💬 You guys are opening a new space, so let me ask: what kind of impact do you seek to have with a space that is much larger than the one you are in right now?
Our big announcement this year was that we are moving from the home that we've been in for six years. We're opening a new space in a new part of the city, which will be about five times bigger than our current ones. It is hugely exciting.
What kind of impact will it allow us to achieve? A couple of things.
One of the key objectives for us in doing this was to have a building and a space that embodies our impact hub’s ethos. For that reason, the whole building is being constructed and renovated in line with circular economy principles. That's a key focus area for us.
We wanted to make sure that throughout this process of opening the space, we keep those ideals in mind of reducing material use, and reusing materials from other buildings, and other sites.
Then, if we do have to use a new material, we make sure that the material itself is reusable for the future so we can take it out of our space at some point and put it to use again. So there's that kind of sustainability impact that we're excited about having with the new space.
But also on the people's side, I think we want this to be an inclusive space more than ever. We're very aware of the limitations of having a small space and not having full control over it in terms of whether everybody can access the space equally. Are all our facilities equally usable for everyone? That's another key thing that we're building into the new space. And obviously, the size means we'll be able to get more of those people in a more diverse crowd and grow this community bigger and bigger.
💬 In our initial interview, you said, and I quote, “We always want to be evolving. This applies to both our physical and digital space, both of which we are looking to expand”. You just now explained how the physical space is going to expand. Can you talk about the digital space? How do you see it growing and how do you want to develop it?
That is another strand that we're looking to grow at the moment. We have to learn quickly because as I said, a year and a half ago we suddenly had this situation where all of our work was virtual and there was no other way.
So actually all of our coworking members became overnight digital members. And one of the big successes of our community team was that most of them stayed with us, which is not a given. If you think about it, the service that people are paying for is based around a physical space. But, through that time when we couldn't use the space as much, we managed to keep our community engaged and keep them going.
We did a huge amount of work on virtual events, everything from kind of well-being sessions to huge hackathons. That has made us realize that there's a lot we can offer to people, whether or not they're going to physically be in the space all the time. So it's not fully defined yet, I would say. But while we're expanding our capacity to have people back in the space in a physical sense, we're also expanding our capacity to have more of a virtual offering for people who might not be with us every day.
💬 You are part of a larger family of Impact Hubs. What does it mean for you to belong to such a large family?
So being part of the Impact Hub Network has always been a huge booster for us. And in the past year or two, even more so I would say. Having the support of a global network made up of over 100 Impact Hubs in almost 60 countries is something special.
And I think I've not known a network that's quite like it in terms of how open everybody is to sharing. If there's a problem that you're experiencing at your local hub, you can be sure that another hub has also experienced that at some point in the past15, or 16 years. So you can go to them and you can find solutions that way, which is valuable.
Specifically, during the time of COVID-19, our global network helped us a lot. I think we had a lot of regular calls sharing best practices about how to keep members safe in the space while checking in with each other and giving a bit of time for our own mental health and well-being.
We found the support of the network valuable for that and it also allows us to have a bigger voice. So one of the early things that we kicked off as a network was contributing to the COVID Response Alliance for Social Entrepreneurs. This was something that had a whole host of organizations involved, but also the World Economic Forum. As part of the Impact Network, we had a small voice in ensuring that these resources were allocated to help social entrepreneurs in such times. And I think we couldn't have done that alone.
💬 You started to talk to us about COVID-19. Has it changed in any way your overall vision behind Impact Berlin and if so, what changed?
That is a really good question. I will take the first part first, in how it impacted us. So as I said, we were kind of forced to digitize much of our work, which has had some good benefits in the long term because it now allows us to build up this kind of digital membership product a little more.
But one of the other immediate effects was that it revitalized the impact community around us, and it resulted in us taking part in a project in which we're still finding out how to believe that it happened. It was a huge hackathon which was called “Wir versus virus”, in German it means “Us against the virus”. This was a partnership collaboration between us and six other organizations and the German government. The broad question was: “What do we do about COVID-19? How do we help the vulnerable people in society? How do we support healthcare workers in these times? How do we support local businesses in these times?” And we had a crazy weekend of virtual coming together, businesses getting on board, government departments getting on board, thousands and thousands of participants resulting in many ideas, a lot of which went on to become longer-term projects and businesses and partnerships as well, which were all around solving these exacerbated problems that the virus had brought up.
That was a huge event for us. It took a lot of energy and effort and a lot of collaboration but has led to some great things and a lot of learning about how we can impact innovation in the virtual world.
In terms of our overall vision, I wouldn't say COVID has changed the core of it because we never said that we have to be in a physical place all the time. We always said that our mission is to create a better, more sustainable set of circumstances for both people and the planet. And how we do that could be a lot of different ways. So I think it's maybe made us see other ways that we can try to achieve that vision, whether it involves doing more of our programs online and that kind of thing. But overall, the vision remains the same.
➡️ Reflections on building Impact Hub Berlin
💬 What has been your biggest learning out of working for Impact Berlin?
For me, it's maybe seeing that your values as a company are more than just words on a piece of paper. In this day and age, every company has its values, whether they are a bank or a butcher. Ours as a network and also in Berlin are trust, courage, and collaboration. We do think about those a lot. And we come back to them increasingly. Those are things that I see every single day coming to work. And I can't say that it is just within our team.
We are a small team of people at Impact Hub Berlin and we collaborate, we trust each other and we act courageously. But it's also a huge learning to see how, when you do those things, they spread within your community.
So we have over 200 members and actually, I see those values between the members themselves, between the members and the team, between the members and other members in the network as well internationally.
That is something for me that shows that there can be a real meaning behind these words. And that's important.
💬 What would be your best advice or piece of advice to someone thinking about opening a coworking space?
To rephrase that, I am to say we're opening a coworking community because another thing that happens to me on an almost daily basis is when someone talks about the value of the community within our members that impacts us within.
Sure you need the space.
But, what people value here, as opposed to other places, is the engagement of other people, the interest of other people, and the ability to meet someone over a coffee and start a project with them that day. This is not that normal from what I hear from other people with other experiences of their daily working life.
So I would give that advice. I would say start with your community values. Bring people together. And everything else will follow. I think if you have that atmosphere and that feeling of belonging and connection, then it will all start to make sense.
💬 If you could chat with a coworking operator anywhere in the world, what would be the one question you would like to ask them?
💬 I would like to ask you the same question but with coworking members. What would you like to ask them?
Maybe it's not so original, but it would be a reflection of my answer for what I would say to coworking operators. I think I would say, what part do you play in this shift to a sustainable coworking world?
Because it's not just on operators, it's on everybody involved, it's on the members as well. How are you going to build on sustainability in your everyday coworking life? Because it's not all just going to happen for you.
There are choices that you're going to make in terms of how you're getting there, what you're consuming, and what you're interacting with. I would like to raise that topic with them as well.
And of course, the other thing would be to say, come, and talk about it with us. Come to an impact hub building if you're here or another one if you're in another part of the world. Come and have that chat with us in person. Because when I ask that question, I genuinely want to know what other people are doing on this and how we can learn from it, too.
💬 What's your biggest dream or aspiration for Impact Hub Berlin?
I can answer as me and hope that my team won't disagree. My dream for Impact Hub Berlin is to mainstream the idea of impact entrepreneurship as linked to this city. I think it is growing extremely fast. In the time that I've been here, which is now four years since I've lived in Berlin, this has just become a more well-known area, but it could go further. I think the dream is that people say “Berlin. Yeah, that's a huge hotspot for impact entrepreneurship. And you know, there are these great guys there at Impact Hub Berlin who are driving that and you need to go and talk to them”.
😎 PS: As we send this story, Impact Hub Berlin just got featured on Deutsche Welle (TV Channel) to discuss the construction process behind their new space! Have a watch, it's quite impressive!
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