What happens when you stop counting community and start building it?
Bernie J Mitchell
🌐 Coworking Community Builder - Most coworking spaces are expensive libraries. I help owner-managed spaces ৸150 build communities via email. = Citizens, not customers.
Link in the Show Notes #20 - (The £2.5 Million Question)
🎙️Link in the Show Notes: Turning our Coworking Values Podcast conversations into practical wisdom for coworking operators.
This week: What Space4 and Founders & Coders in Finsbury Park and a neurodiversity expert from Berlin taught us about the measurement trap.
You know that spreadsheet.
The one where you track "social value" for the council.
Jobs created: £14.43 per hour of support. Skills developed: £242.67 per week of training. Business advice is provided at £50 per session.
Space4 has delivered £2.5 million in social value to Islington Council.
But here's what kills me about that number.
The best stuff doesn't fit in the boxes.
The Unmeasurable Economy
Natasha from SPACE4 admits it straight up: "It's complicated to capture because our space is extremely informal and organic."
She's literally "sitting at our desk and we see two people meeting in a meeting room, and we're like, Oh, what's that about? That is social value."
They're chasing shadows.
Trying to document the undocumentable.
The government wants community building measured like factory output. Hours of business support. Jobs created. Skills transferred.
Real community doesn't work that way.
Every Wednesday at Space4, a community lunch takes place. Someone in the space organises it. They buy from local independents. People learn what everyone does. Freelancers find clients. The public can buy five spots through Eventbrite.
As Natasha puts it: "It's a really good way to help businesses network with each other in a really nice, friendly, informal way."
Thirty people are eating together for one hour.
No spreadsheet captures the moment someone realises they belong.
The Belonging Infrastructure
Here's what three different approaches taught me about real community building:
Space4 doesn't explain its values.
"I don't think we actually explicitly really explain anything in particular. It's very much the atmosphere of the space and the posters on the wall... the culture of the space explains itself." says Natasha Natarajan
Walk in. Feel it. Get it or don't.
Founders and Coders doesn't gatekeep.
Dan Sofer: "We're on the ground here in Finsbury Park, and anyone walking off the street can come to any of our open sessions."
Free. Open. No barriers.
In 2020: "Every single one of our graduates who finished our programme got jobs as software developers within a few months of leaving us."
All 47 of them.
Not because of the curriculum. Because of the community.
The neurodivergent lens cuts deepest.
Emily interviewed Aidan from Cobot | Coworking Software, on the Coworking Values Podcast where they explain: "The gap between how spaces are designed and how people actually need to work, it's genuinely massive."
Most policies? "A lot of policies are written to manage the majority's comfort."
Real inclusion asks a different question: "What do the people most affected by exclusion need to thrive?"
Aidan's answer: "Even if it's not a fully insulated space, just having a little room on the side where somebody can retreat... I think it's something that can often be arranged."
One quiet room. Gender-neutral bathrooms. Pronouns normalised.
Small changes. Massive impact.
The Cooperative Difference
Here's what nobody tells you about Space4.
Two women of colour run it as co-directors of Outlandish Cooperative.
Natasha Natarajan: "We have complete independence and control over what we do here."
Maddy Neghabian: "There's two of us women running the space. I think that's really special, actually."
Not just managing. Owning.
That shifts everything.
Here's the revolutionary bit: Islington Council doesn't charge them rent.
The council foregoes potential rental income. Instead, Space4 pays in social value.
As Natasha explains: "We don't pay rent, but we pay them in social value."
That's the bet Islington is making - that community impact matters more than rental income.
£2.5 million in social value delivered so far.
Revolutionary? Absolutely. Bureaucratic? "It's definitely tricky to track," says Natasha. Worth it? Ask the 47 Founders & Coders graduates with jobs.
Natasha walks down Finsbury Park and "people wave at me so much that I feel like a minor celebrity... because I just know loads of people through using their businesses."
That's not in the Tom's Framework.
Neither is the coding graduate now teaching the next cohort. Or the quiet room where someone finally found peace.
The spreadsheet captures the transaction. The community creates the transformation.
🍉The Gaza Reality Check
Dan's team built coding schools in Gaza, the West Bank, and Nazareth.
"The office and the campus that they ran out of have been flattened, and so as a physical space, it's gone."
But the graduates from London and Gaza had already created Yalla Cooperative - a digital agency owned and run by members in Gaza, the UK and across the EU.
From Yalla's website: "We are on a mission to create a fairer world through the way we work and in what we build."
The Gaza office? Flattened.
But Yalla still operates. Still taking clients. Still paying developers.
That's what real social impact looks like.
Not sympathy. Economic action.
Apply This: Beyond the Measurement Trap
Stop performing impact. Start enabling it.
Create collision points, not programmes:
Weekly community lunch (not networking events)
Open sessions anyone can join (not member-only workshops)
Quiet zones for deep work (not just collaboration areas)
Document stories, not metrics:
Who met who? What emerged months later?
Which freelancer found their first client?
Which local business hired from your space?
Design for extremes, benefit everyone:
Quiet space for neurodivergent folks? Everyone needs it when overwhelmed
Gender-neutral bathrooms? Parents with opposite-gender kids need them
Flexible membership? Perfect for the gig/freelancer/creator economy reality
Build cooperative ownership:
Give community builders actual control
Share financial decision-making
Create accountability to members, not investors
Resource Spotlight: The Tom's Framework
Islington Council uses the Tom's Framework to measure social value.
As Natasha explains: "It basically assigns monetary value to particular things. That might be getting a job for someone, or it might be providing business support."
Useful for council contracts.
Useless for understanding actual impact.
Better approach: Document everything. Then translate into their language.
Connect With The Community
Next week: The Hospitality Paradox - why treating coworking like a hotel kills community
While you're waiting, here's where our community is doing the work:
Coworking Canada 2025 - Ashley Proctor's unconference Register
Freelance Business Month October 2025 - Elina Jutelyte - Join
This Week in Coworking's newsletter Subscribe
Workspace Design Show London - Business Design Centre, February 2026
LinkedIn Coworking Group - 8,000+ operators Join
Unreasonable Connection - by London Coworking Assembly August 20th RSVP
Community Voices & Episode Highlights
Space4 and the Social Value Challenge Natasha Natarajan, Co-Director "It's definitely tricky to track all these socially valuable interactions that happen in our space." The most valuable interactions are immeasurable.
Founders & Coders: From Gaza to Finsbury Park Dan Sofer, Founder "The combination of a training organisation and a coworking space is quite powerful." Peer-led learning beats any curriculum.
Designing for Neurodivergent Belonging Aidan Sunassee with Emily Breder "When you build for the margins, everyone benefits." Build for the margins, everyone thrives.
🎙️Listen here on the Coworking Values Podcast
One More Thing:
Your Direct challenge: Before our August 20th Unreasonable Connection on performative gestures, document one unmeasurable moment from your space this week.
Something real that changed someone's trajectory - not for the spreadsheet, but because it mattered.
Stop measuring community lunch attendance. Start recording whose life changed because of it.
Send it to me. I read everything.
Thank you for your time and attention today
Bernie 💚🍉
p.s. Subscribe - Coworking Values Podcast
🌱 Authentic Coworking Content @ Cobot :)
1moWhat a strong newsletter you got this week! It's such a funny concept to put social value in numbers: Imagine someone trips on the stairs at a coworking space and has to pay a doctor £1,000. The coworking space could claim they generated £1,000 worth of "GDP value" since that spending counts toward GDP. On the other hand, similar to your example, what if on the way home from the space, two people share an idea that grows into a seven-figure business within a couple of years? How do you assign that? 😅 Still, it's very nice that SPACE4 manages to do that and, quite frankly, very progressive from the council. Don't know if this is common in the UK, but maybe if we see more of this around the world, it would be easier to come up with ways to assign this number... Aidan is great as always, and such a sad, yet inspiring story from Yalla Cooperative. Stay strong!