In 2022 SPACE4 was awarded a two-year grant from the Disrupt Foundation to develop a programme of public education in our Finsbury Park events space.
Our charitable purposes
The goals of the programme were ‘relieving poverty’, ‘advancement of community development through capacity building’ and ‘advancement of education through tech training’. In line with our values and to match these charitable goals, we organised our events around four main themes:
- Progressive economics
- Tech for good
- Community activism + social issues
- Practical skills to support the local economy
A New Events & Partnerships Coordinatior
We hired a new member of our team, Natasha, to lead on this project 3 days a week. She created a regular and professionally structured programme of events with a new brand and system on Eventbrite. We launched this in January 2023. It consisted of:
- Monday Evening Masterclasses. These consisted of three skills-based masterclasses a season (each consisting of three sessions).
- Thursday Evening Discussion Events. These were presentations, panel discussions, live podcast recordings, board games nights, banquet dinners, film screenings and conferences to network people. We hosted at least two of these per month.
Natasha also worked on developing new partnerships through community outreach and networking with the council, local businesses and community groups, as well as wider thematically connected organisations to raise awareness of our space and build long-term relationships to collaborate with.
The impact we’ve made
- By May 2024 we’d hosted 75 events with 2k+ people through our doors.
- Public, thematically-focused, and well marketed events attracted wider and diverse audiences into our network and co-working space; at least 70% of audiences at any given event never having been to SPACE4 before. This created more business and professional development opportunities to all users of the space.
- Natasha’s community outreach and networking raised awareness of our events and built new long-term partnerships. So much so that in the second year of our programme, 80% of our events were collaborations with other like-minded organisations resulting in our network growing even more.
- We prioritised giving speaking and masterclass opportunities to people from our space. This allowed us create a culture of knowledge sharing within our community. Because we’re also a coworking space, this spirit of learning has spilled over into everyday life and facilitated more informal sharing in the space.
- Widening our network and continuously platforming people in it has made SPACE4 a thriving environment for networking. Natasha who has an overview has also been able to make targeted introductions and strategically bring people together.