Building the community

[Chef Tiffani Rozier]

I want to start a coworking space in Phoenix, Arizona..with a focus on food and hospitality. All the research I've done strongly recommends building the community first. My question is simple, how do you start that community??

[Alex Hillman]

Hey Tiffani! Oh, this is near and dear to my heart. My fiancé is a chef and I've had so much joy watching her get involved in our local food community...and learning how the approaches that helped get Indy Hall off the ground apply in her (and your!) industry as well. I plan to have her on my podcast soon to talk about some of her work...most recently using our community building process to build a very successful Hallal program within the university she works at. 

ANYWAY, back to your "how do you actually do it" question!

I summarized some of the most important early steps here. You can check out another amazing example of the getting-started process in action in this story from Chicago.

Bottom line is to start by looking to the communities that you're already a part of, and already exist, but aren't perfect. That's where you'll find the most amazing clues for what kinds of needs you can serve...and from there, figure out how coworking (which, at the end of the day, is more about the act of helping people come together than providing a physical space) can help solve those problems. 

The exact steps vary a bit depending on who's in that community, how people are already convening, and how they want to convene. Don't feel like you need to invent things from scratch...down that path lies madness. Instead, focus on helping out things that are already in motion...or things that just need a tiny OOMPH of encouragement to get going. 

Make sense? :)

-Alex

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The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.

Better Coworkers: http://indyhall.org

Weekly Coworking Tips: http://coworkingweekly.com

My Audiobook: https://theindyhallway.com/ten

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 1:33 AM, Chef Tiffani Rozier <tiffani...@gmail.com> wrote:

I want to start a coworking space in Phoenix, Arizona..with a focus on food and hospitality. All the research I've done strongly recommends building the community first. My question is simple, how do you start that community??

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[Angel Kwiatkowski]

Hi, I just did an in depth interview on how to use Meetup and Jelly to build a community before you get a building. Please enjoy Mark Eaton's wise words at http://coherecommunity.com/consulting/using-meetup-to-start-a-coworking-community

Angel