You're Not Running a 'Real' Coworking Space—The Lie Independent Operators Tell Themselves
February 24th. Blue Garage, Lewisham. The room's full. Coworking operators, local authority people, housing associations, and artists. 60 people in an industrial makerspace with concrete floors and fabrication equipment in the background. The kind of space where real work happens, not the kind you photograph for Instagram. The conversations are good. Sharp. People are asking the right questions—How do we make coworking spaces profitable? What's our role in the future of work w
Democracy Won't Be Born in Westminster. It's Being Built in Back Streets and Coworking Spaces.
LinkedIn Show Notes #39 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. Three people. Two continents. One pattern: They stopped waiting for the state to fix what's broken and started building the infrastructure themselves. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking a question that keeps showing up in different forms. What happens when the systems we rely on—democracy, childcare, theBeing Together Is the Point
Stop building programmes. Start building the community before you need it. You're building another programme. Workshop series. Speaker event. Networking night. Something structured to bring people together. And you're exhausted before it even starts. You know how this goes: * Weeks of planning * Marketing anxiety * Worrying about attendance * Then on the day, a handful show up * The cYou're Not Running a 'Real' Coworking Space—The Lie Independent Operators Tell Themselves
February 24th. Blue Garage, Lewisham. The room's full. Coworking operators, local authority people, housing associations, and artists. 60 people in an industrial makerspace with concrete floors and fabrication equipment in the background. The kind of space where real work happens, not the kind you photograph for Instagram. The conversations are good. Sharp. People are asking the right questions—How do we make coworking spaces profitable? What's our role in the future of work w
Democracy Won't Be Born in Westminster. It's Being Built in Back Streets and Coworking Spaces.
LinkedIn Show Notes #39 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. Three people. Two continents. One pattern: They stopped waiting for the state to fix what's broken and started building the infrastructure themselves. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking a question that keeps showing up in different forms. What happens when the systems we rely on—democracy, childcare, the
At 30,000 Feet the Rules Work. At Ground Level They Don't.
LinkedIn Show Notes #36 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast At 30,000 feet, physics works. Checklists save lives. You follow the rules, you survive.At ground level, the checklists are rigged depending on who you are. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking how three people landed in broken human systems and built their own cockpits. Where marginalised people write the r
They Built Infrastructure for the Energy Money Can't Capture
LinkedIn Show Notes #35 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. Three community builders. Three continents. One pattern: They stopped selling memberships and started building movements that run on relationships, not transactions. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking how coworking spaces can become laboratories for post-capitalist organising. Not in theory—in practice. WExplore More Content
They Host Church, Stop Brain Drain, and Won't Put Their Film on Netflix—And They're Winning
LinkedIn Show Notes #34 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. Three different community builders. Two continents. One pattern: They stopped optimising for scale and started building for depth. And the people who needed them showed up. This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen: We've been tracking why some spaces feel like communities and others feel like expensive libraries with good Wi-Fi. T
A 17-Year-Old in a McKenzie Hoodie Just Destroyed the Entire Coworking Industry With One Question.
LinkedIn Show Notes #37 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. In 2019, a 17-year-old in a McKenzie hoodie at Mainyard Studios in Hackney shouted at me from the back of a workshop: "What the fuck is coworking? Why don't you just call it work?" He was right. The trans inclusion consultant in London, the Armenian revolutionary in Yerevan, and the cooperative director in Finsbury Park all stopped playing
It's Not the Brand Partnerships. So What Actually Keeps Your Members Coming Back?
LinkedIn Show Notes #33 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. Refugees. Social capital. Citizens. Three answers to the same question—people stay when they're citizens, not consumers. At yesterday's Unreasonable Connection , we asked: "What keeps your members coming back when they could work from home for free?" Most answers were real, human, and straightforward. No one said the flying trapeze, ice ba
Social Capital Isn't a Byproduct. It's THE Product.
LinkedIn Show Notes #31 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast. What three crisis stories from Armenia, Gaza, and London reveal about the invisible currency that keeps independent coworking spaces alive when everything else collapses. Sara Anjargolian 's coworking space in Yerevan had glass walls. Deliberate. Radical. In post-Soviet Armenia, where secrecy was a matter of survival, transparency was an ac
The Future of Coworking is a Career, Not a Gig
LinkedIn Show Notes #30 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. While you were running your space, we've been talking to the future—three FLOC leaders, one message: it's time to choose careers over gigs. I was once sitting at a table for lunch with a group of Coworking Space leaders, and a woman almost had to apologise as she presented her idea of creating an event where women who work in the Coworking industry in the UK could connect and support each other. A man at that table told her t