Why coworking spaces like ours really matter!
You likely know the story of how The Business Hive started... me a recently-landed freelancer needing to find people like me when we first arrived. You might not know that I'm a perpetual student - last year, I completed a degree in why our kind of business infrastructure is so critical in communities like ours. I got a distinction - which is not so much a testament to my academic prowess but our passion.
A couple of years ago, I read this article which (for once) described the wellbeing and economic impacts of coworking-type spaces in plain english. It's from the Center on Rural Innovation in the US - a country that's becoming expert at fighting failing small town economies. What's particularly gratifying to us is that they identified the three pieces of necessary infrastructure that rural communities need for thriving digital economy ecosystems;
broadband,
coworking and entrepreneurship spaces,
and local leadership capacity.
It's gratifying because that's the heart of our actual business - not in theory but in practice...
the high-speed broadband that often our rural communities can't access from home,
the space for people to work, meet, engage and inspire new opportunities and new partnerships,
and Amanda Fleming - one of New Zealand's leading transformational facilitators, and her ground-breaking professional development programmes (yes, including leadership).
There's heaps of research before and since then, a recent one is from January this year - the Journal of Rural Studies published a largely British-based research paper confirming the importance of coworking spaces in rural communities there. What's clear from the research is that, all over the world, people (including local authorities) are starting to wake up to the ongoing benefits in their communities. So a huge thanks to everyone who's been supporting us - you are genuinely supporting our whole community - which is also our reason for being!
