Digital 52 5️⃣ - Digital Nomads, Remote Workers, Locals: How do you bring everyone together and create a stronger local impact? This is the story of Centralita Cowork 🇲🇽.

Read the story of Centralita Cowork on page 174 of "Around The World in 250 Coworking Spaces".

We first came across Centralita Cowork, the coworking space you are about to discover, on the internet. We were looking for coworking spaces in Mexico and found ourselves attracted by its name: Centralita.

Initially, we didn’t understand it the way Grecia Pinto, the founder, had intended, as we found out when she later explained it to us. Rather we took it to mean “coworking in the center”. When we clicked on the website to find out more, we really liked what we saw. A space with soft color tones, daylight, greenery, and what seemed to be a nice atmosphere. Before even contacting the team running Centralita Cowork, we started picturing in our heads who the founder(s) could be. We immediately pictured a woman, someone good with visual design, assembling colors but above all, someone who pays attention to the small details.

We wanted to reach out to them to learn more about their coworking story, and to our surprise, our initial assumptions were all correct. Grecia Pinto was exactly what we’d imagined. She definitely reinforced our belief that “coworking spaces are the reflection of their founders.” Looking at Centralita Cowork, it was easy to ‘get’ what she wanted to create.

After our first time chatting, we left our call in awe of her dedication to using her coworking space to bring together two crowds who might not meet very often: travelers and locals. Why wouldn’t they meet? San Cristobal de las Casas is a tourist-heavy city in Chiapas, and since Centralita Cowork is located in the center of it, it would be easy to assume that locals avoid these areas at all costs.

And yet, Grecia made it happen. Slowly but surely, she was able to positively impact San Cristobal de las Casas with her own project: Centralita Cowork.

How has she done it? Let’s make our way to San Cristobal de las Casas to find out!

➡️ A little refresher

Who’s behind the featured space?

Meet Grecia Pinto, a young professional who found a way to get closer to the city she had just moved to when she found coworking.

“I wanted to connect with other creatives but didn’t know where or how to meet them. I used to think ‘I’m sure there are other people like me, working at home on their projects. Maybe even some that share my interests in sustainable fashion and design? It would be so interesting to meet them. But where? They’re all at home or scattered across the 200 cafes in San Cris.’ As there were no coworking spaces, I set out to create one for myself and for other people like me; people who enjoy working in a vibrant environment surrounded by peers, pets, and plants. I built Centralita in order to bring the creatives, slow travelers, and digital nomads together into a communal environment that would allow us to share our projects and creative interests much more naturally than in bars or coffee shops.”

🎥 Watch our LIVE with Centralita Cowork below!

➡️ Key Figures

• Opening year: 2019
• Size when they started: 1 space, 350 sqm
• Size today: 2 spaces and a garden :)

➡️ A little tour around Centralita Cowork

➡️ Behind-the-scenes

Things you didn't read in aw250cs

➡️ Centralita Cowork Today

One of the key takeaways behind “Around The World in 250 Coworking Spaces” revolves around the positive impact of coworking spaces on any city. Bigger cities might have the chance to have more coworking spaces in them, meaning more opportunities overall. But for second to third-tier cities, even the opening of one coworking space makes a big impact and a big difference. When working on the story of Grecia and Centralita Cowork, it became apparent that beyond just opening coworking spaces per se, Grecia has opened social spaces for travelers and locals to come to.

But sometimes, having to deal with different communities (locals and foreigners, people coming every day, and travelers coming for a few days or a few weeks) can feel like a challenge to the sense of community one wishes to create. As this is something Grecia had to deal with since the inception of Centralita Cowork, I decided to focus our follow-up interviews on understanding how she does it.

💫 Growing their local impact

💬 Who are the members at Centralita Cowork?

The majority of our members are people who are either traveling for long periods of time or have relocated to Mexico or to San Cristobal. Many of them relocated from big cities following the pandemic.

We have some clients from San Francisco, for example, who work for tech companies, or we have teachers from all over Mexico who are university professors. But since everything is now online, they do it from here. All of them are looking for a calmer life or maybe also for their paychecks to stretch further because San Cristobal offers a nice quality of living and it's not expensive at all. That's very attractive for people who can work remotely.

💬 How do you bring all of those target audiences together?

A few months ago, we started a community that is not directly serving coworkers, but a lot of coworkers are part of it. It's targeted at those who have businesses here in San Cris., to help each other with our digital presence. We meet on Tuesdays. It's mostly women although everyone is invited, it's a lot of feminine energy. The event series is called “Jefas en la era digital” (Bosses of the digital space).

We want to keep that feminine energy and we see how nice it is for guys who come because they can observe ways to do business that are more feminine. It's heartwarming. Every meeting focuses on one topic. It's in Spanish and although a lot of our coworkers don't speak Spanish yet, the ones who do and attend, really like it. What often ends up happening is that our members become clients of these other businesses because they're Airbnbs and restaurants.

Beyond our Tuesday meetups, we're organizing events with those small businesses around town and we always invite our coworkers so they can get to discover new places run by locals. The beauty of it all is that those small businesses are hidden gems, ones that are not located in the tourist areas of our town. They are hospitality businesses, restaurants, or courses and they have a lot to offer and to teach!

Looking back, I see how those events have helped our coworkers to experience the town a little bit more like a local and to know that by joining those events, they’re supporting local businesses. The local businesses we bring together are friendlier and more flexible, and our coworkers really like that because they can go on tours that are more tailored to what they want to do instead of going with a big tour company that already has a very set schedule.

For the small businesses that form part of our community, having a digital presence wasn't a priority at all. Even if they did have one, they weren't putting that much effort into it. But with the pandemic, most people realized that they needed a stronger digital presence. So now we're on it together.

💬 In the story of Centralita Cowork in the book, you talk a lot about COVID-19. The pandemic has been a very prominent part of your journey, can you talk to us about it?

Well, we have the second space because we were looking for houses because we decided to move into our first coworking space during 2020 to save on costs. We found the second space and thought it would be the perfect addition to the first one, so we went ahead and took it. It was maybe a little bit sooner than what we would otherwise have planned. But I think the pandemic opened some opportunities because a lot of businesses moved, closed, etc.

Our vision has changed after the pandemic because the needs of our coworkers have changed. Our clients have changed. For instance, it became so common for them to take video calls, up to 2 to 3 times a day. And in the past, it was much less. Our spaces have adapted to this new need of theirs. We now provide different spaces where they can feel comfortable taking a Zoom call. And that's why we took this space with a garden. That was the main issue we wanted to solve for us as a community.

Having a lot of people in the same open building, and having Zoom calls, means the voices kind of mix together and it creates too much background noise. When we were looking for a second space we were thinking we might build some cabins to solve that issue. Then we found this place with a garden and we thought “Howhave been about dispersing the sound and making spaces to work close to the trees?”. San Cristobal de las Casas is not a super big city so we don't want to put people in little cubicles. We chose to emphasize the feeling of being closer to the mountains, in a small town.

In our initial space, in central San Cristobal, we’ve added more soundproofing panels to have better sound absorption. Funnily enough, a lot of people record podcasts in the garden of our second space because you can hear the birds and it's nice background noise.

Honestly, I think we're still learning what the new normal means for work and for our coworking spaces because companies are still changing or making new rules for their employees. Some of our clients had to go back to Europe or the US to sort things out and then some of them came back. Now that things are more open, it feels like people are trying different cities for work and deciding where to settle. We also feel it in the housing market, prices are going up because there's demand.

➡️ Reflections on building Centralita Cowork

💬 What would you say has been your biggest learning from bringing to life and growing Centralita Cowork?

The first thing that comes to my mind is that I realized that for me to renew my energy and keep doing my job, I wanted to have a community around me. That's where I used Centralita to bring a group of women that have small businesses in San Cristobal together so we could have that community where we share concerns and struggles, and where we support each other. That really helped me as the owner/manager of Centralita.

I realized how important it is to have a community you can rely on. By that, I don’t mean community as in all belonging to the same business. I mean the importance of having a community with other businesses and other professionals, which is what coworking is all about. Even if they're absolutely not in the same company as you, a lot of collaborations come out of sharing a space, and a lot of exchanging of information.

That's really helping me and I feel that I belong to this interesting community, a community for people that have been living here for some time, in which you also find many locals.

It has inspired me to look for more ways to create a community for our clients who are traveling. I'm like, “Okay, this really works for me. What would work for someone who's here for only one month?” Because in the past, with the events we've done, I learned that it's a constant process of trial and error. Like the time we started doing cacao ceremonies in our garden and invited our coworkers. But it turned out that they weren't that interested in that for some reason, which is okay. It's more a case of getting to know our public better and serving more of what they are interested in.

💬 What would be your best piece of advice to someone thinking about opening a coworking space somewhere in the world?

The first thing that comes to mind is to think about spaces for calls. Spend some time thinking about and designing them. Ask yourself, where are the people going to be video calling a lot from? I think that's what I get asked the most about. I see our members looking for a cute cool corner with a good background, good lighting, and good sound.

“And then for someone opening a coworking space, I would say get the best wifi possible. It might sound extremely basic, but it’s everything to coworkers as this is where they do their work.”

One last thing: organize community events and tell yourself it will be a long trial and error journey. Listen to what your members ask for when it comes to events, and have them host the events they want. I learned that events created by coworkers for other coworkers attract the most people. Especially when they're travelers, they have so much to share.

We, as locals, are not traveling, but we create those spaces for them to meet with us.

💬 If you could chat with a coworking operator, not necessarily someone from Mexico, but just another person like you running in the coworking space, what would you like to ask him/her/them?

If you wish to answer Grecia, make your way to the comments section below!

💬 This is a great bridge to my next question, because I would like to ask you if you could ask something to a coworker, what would you like to ask him/her?

To echo my previous answers, I’d be curious to ask them about events. What events do you like? What events would you come to? We are a tourist town, and our coworkers are very diverse, so I have found it a little difficult to find a common ground for most coworkers. Although the way Centralita is, the coworkers all know each other. They keep seeing each other outside of the coworking space. They are also trying to figure out their own way to navigate the city and get to know places. But I am curious to find out what we could do more of for them.

💬 My last question to you is what is your biggest aspiration or your biggest dream for Centralita?

To have coworking spaces in different tourist towns in Mexico, like Oaxaca or maybe the south. Members sometimes tell me, “Oh, I really love Oaxaca, but I wish Centralita was there.” There are, of course, coworking spaces in Oaxaca, but it's a nice compliment.

I would like that.

I have to admit that I really enjoy the slow life here. It's thanks to the pandemic that more and more people can now live in these very quiet, relaxing towns, and still keep their jobs, even if their company is based in some other city in the world. It makes for a really nice life balance. I see that our clients are sometimes very stressed - working, working, working. But as opposed to people working in big cities, they get to experience the mountains and nature and they learn how to slow down. A least a bit.

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