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 word games and started building actual infrastructure.
Turns out McKenzie Lad understood something the venture capital crowd still doesn’t.
This week from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen:
We’ve been tracking why some spaces feel essential to their communities while others feel like expensive libraries with good WiFi.
Turns out it’s not about amenities or scale.
It’s about whether you’re building infrastructure or extracting money.
We found three infrastructure builders across two continents. Here’s what they built.
The Assignment
Tash Koster-Thomas runs equity and inclusion workshops for organisations across London, including companies like WE CREATE SPACE.
She knows something most diversity consultants don’t: sometimes safety requires exclusion.
Sara Anjargolian built Impact Hub Yerevan with glass walls in post-Soviet Armenia.
Then watched those walls become the rehearsal space for a peaceful revolution.
Natasha Natarajan runs SPACE4 in Finsbury Park as co-director of Outlandish Cooperative.
She’s delivering £2.5 million in social value to Islington Council while most coworking chains extract value from communities.
None of them took venture capital.
None of them scaled globally.
None of them was optimised for “premium amenities.”
Instead, they built infrastructure.
The Injustice We’re Tracking
Here’s the tribal identity driving coworking’s yuppification:
“People like us deserve premium amenities.”
Scale fast, attract enterprise clients, monetise every square foot, exit to a bigger player.
Chase the premium market when the middle class gets squeezed.
Turn community spaces into luxury products for Young Urban Professionals whilst pricing out the people who actually need it.
Seth Godin talks about how “people like us do things like this” drives decisions.
The corporate coworking story performs this tribal exclusion:
“People like us optimise personal brands and choose from premium menus.”
This isn’t just market competition.
It’s investors who extract profit, pricing out the very diversity that makes coworking valuable in the first place.
I know coworking brands we all worship on LinkedIn whose main investors are also investors in battle tech, bankrolling companies like Elbit Systems.
When profit becomes the only metric, community becomes collateral damage.
Like the space my mate ran in in Old Street, owned by overseas investors, that shut without notice.
A lawyer walked in: “We need to close the building now. The company has decided to stop operating as it’s no longer profitable.”
They fired a missile from far away and walked away.
The tribal message becomes clear:
“People like us can afford to disrupt McKenzie Lad’s day for better quarterly returns.”
The market won’t fix this. The state won’t fix this. People do.
Tash Koster-Thomas: The Infrastructure of Safety
Tash spent a decade watching organisations talk about inclusion while systematically excluding the people who most needed safety.
As an equity, diversity, and inclusion consultant, she’d seen the pattern: “We want to be inclusive” followed by policies that chose comfort over safety.
Then came the test.
During a virtual LGBTQ+ workshop with 200 attendees, racist comments started appearing in the chat. Comments she couldn’t see until they were displayed publicly on screen.
“I had this real visceral reaction that I couldn’t control, and I started to cry,” Tash recalls.
“I’m not going to hide my tears right now. I’m not going to apologise for what I share today… So often people sit behind keyboards and write these comments and they don’t see the impact of their words. And today I want you to see the impact.”
That moment revealed something critical: the difference between performative inclusion and infrastructure.
Real safety infrastructure requires hard choices.
As Tash puts it: “A safe space can’t always be a space that everybody comes to, because then by default, it stops being a safe space for the core demographic that you’re trying to defend and support.”
This isn’t about being “nice to everyone.”
It’s about building systems that protect people when legal systems create fear and instability.
The infrastructure she builds is simple and specific: gender-neutral bathrooms or explicit signage saying “you have the freedom to use whatever bathroom feels right for you.”
Consistent, non-performative allyship.
Clear processes for handling conflict in real time.
When UK legal rulings create confusion about trans rights, coworking spaces become essential civic infrastructure—places where people can exist safely while everything else shifts around them.
Sara Anjargolian: The Infrastructure of Democracy
Sara was an American lawyer who could’ve stayed comfortable in Los Angeles.
Instead, she moved to post-Soviet Armenia because she saw civic activism beginning and “absolutely wanted to be part of it.”
In 2015, they opened Impact Hub Yerevan with walls of glass.
This wasn’t an aesthetic choice. It was political infrastructure.
“We built it all with glass so everyone could see what everyone else was doing,” Sara explains.
“We were turning that idea upside down and pushing forth that collaboration is actually power and sharing is power.”
In a country where power came from secrecy, transparency was revolution.
The organic collaborations were proof-of-concept: an architect, a winemaker, and a crowdfunding platform working together to “empower our grape farmers… to actually build tasting rooms on their land” instead of just selling grapes.
Then came the real test: the 2018 Velvet Revolution.
“Many of the people who were on the streets were our members, myself included,” Sara recalls.
The values they’d been practising inside those glass walls—transparency, collaboration, shared power—”started to spill out onto the streets.”
The revolution was peaceful. Not one person died.
“All of a sudden, the country outside of the walls of Impact Hub started to espouse the same values as what we had been talking about inside the walls of our Impact Hub.”
This is infrastructure working at scale.
The space wasn’t just hosting democracy; it was rehearsing democracy.
When war came in 2020, that infrastructure adapted instantly:
“We turned from a coworking space… into almost a humanitarian centre, trying to help… our boys on the front lines… and all of the people who were displaced from their homes.”
You can’t plan for every crisis.
But you can build infrastructure that adapts to whatever comes.
Natasha Natarajan: The Infrastructure of Economic Justice
Natasha came to Space4 in Finsbury Park three years ago to research cooperatives for her master’s thesis.
Now she and Maddy Neghabian co-run Outlandish Cooperative, both the tech agency and the physical space.
Space4 is different: they don’t pay rent to Islington Council. Instead, they pay in social value.
“We became one of Islington Council‘s affordable workspaces. We got that deal by having an organisation called Founders & Coders as one of our anchor tenants.”
The result: Natasha and Maddy have delivered £2.5 million in social value so far.
Dan Sofer runs Founders and Coders —free coding bootcamps that turn people into developers. It’s one of the longest-running, most important stories in community-driven tech education. And one of my favourite London coworking examples to share.
Dan’s graduates go on to create cooperatives like Gaza Sky Geeks and Yalla Cooperative—proving that peer-led learning beats any curriculum when it comes to economic infrastructure.
Corporate coworking will never understand this:
The most valuable stuff doesn’t fit in the council’s spreadsheets.
“It’s definitely tricky to track all these socially valuable interactions that happen in our space,” Natasha admits.
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.”
Every Wednesday, they run their legendary community lunch.
Someone in the space organises it. They buy from local businesses. Freelancers find clients.
“It’s a really good way to help businesses network with each other in a really nice, friendly, informal way.”
When Natasha walks down Finsbury Park, “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 social value framework.
That’s worth more than any corporate membership fee.
The space also runs Finsbury Park Job Club every Friday—run by Williamz Omope with “open doors, no signups required,” helping people with everything from CV writing to using AI tools to draft letters to landlords about mould.
Cooperative ownership changes everything:
“There’s two of us women running the space. I think that’s really special, actually, because we have complete independence and control over what we do here.”
Two women of colour running economic infrastructure in North London, proving that ownership changes everything.
The Pattern
McKenzie Lad was right.
Tash Koster-Thomas doesn’t talk about “inclusion frameworks.” She makes sure trans people can use the bathroom safely.
Sara Anjargolian didn’t build a “collaborative workspace.” She built a place where democracy could be practiced before it was needed in the streets.
Natasha Natarajan doesn’t run “community events.” She runs Job Club every Friday because people need work.
They answered McKenzie Lad’s question by stopping the jargon and starting the work.
The corporate story says: scale fast, monetise everything, optimise for premium amenities.
The infrastructure story says: show up for your neighbourhood when official systems fail.
Your coworking space is already this infrastructure. The question isn’t whether to do this work. The question is whether you’re naming it.
How to Answer McKenzie Lad in Your Space
There’s a 25-minute film called ACTionism that does exactly what Tash, Sara, and Natasha do.
It cuts through the jargon and gets to the work. It follows 16-year-old Ellie Meredith from climate anxiety to collective action.
No theory. No frameworks. Just: “Here’s what happens when people sit together, talk honestly, and leave with next steps.”
More and more coworking spaces are hosting ACTionism screenings.
It’s the perfect McKenzie Lad test—25 minutes of film plus conversation that actually works.
Today (Wednesday 3-7PM) at Urban MBA near Old Street:
Jon Alexander is screening it with the current cohort. Food by Urban MBA graduates who started African and Caribbean businesses!
This is what neighbourhood workspace looks like when it supports everyone, not just the laptop class.
At least ten coworking spaces are already hosting screenings.
They’ve figured out what we keep trying to complicate:
- Show film.
- Start a conversation.
- Stop pretending community happens by magic.
After 25 minutes, you’ll know whether this works in your space.
You’ll have felt what happens when people realise they’re not alone with their concerns.
Anyone can host a screening—a WeWork in Moorgate or a co-op in Ilford for Grime artists.
👉 Request your ACTionism screening here.
This is the citizen response to consumer coworking.
This is how you answer McKenzie Lad.
Who This Is For
If McKenzie Lad would look at your space and ask, “Why don’t you just call it work?” this is for you.
If you’re tired of performing “people like us deserve premium amenities” when specificity is your strength, this is for you.
Your tribe chooses: “People like me host screenings and build tables for others.”
You don’t need venture capital to pass the McKenzie Lad test. Start with who needs you most. Measure success by whether they’d wave at you in the street.
You’re not failing because you haven’t yuppified. You’re building civic infrastructure.
If that’s your tribe, McKenzie Lad was right—you don’t need permission to just call it work.
Fearless Front-Facers Recognition
Shout-out to Kofi to Urban MBA hosting ACTionism tonight with Jon Alexander.
Shout-out to the ten+ spaces already hosting screenings across London. Shout-out to everyone choosing “just call it work” over jargon.
You’re answering McKenzie Lad’s question with action, not explanations.
The movement needs your story.
We’re documenting next from the Bullpen
More ACTionism screenings. More McKenzie Lad moments. More infrastructure builders choosing work over jargon.
If you’re building civic infrastructure disguised as a coworking space, we want to hear about it. Even after 300+ Coworking Values Podcast’s we’re still meeting new stories every week!
Do The Work
1️⃣ Host an ACTionism screening
Host 25-minute film + conversation. Request your ACTionism screening here.
Ten spaces are already hosting. Don’t be the one who waits!
2️⃣ McKenzie Lad Test your space
Could a 17-year-old in a hoodie understand what you do without jargon? If not, start there.
3️⃣ Start thinking about European Coworking Day 2026
One of the best ways on earth is to join with other like-minded coworking community builders in your local area and collaborate on European Coworking Day 2026.
4️⃣ Join Marko Orel, Helga Moreno, and Jeannine van der Linden
On November 27th, online, they discuss the development of coworking support for Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022. RSVP here
5️⃣ Join the London Coworking Assembly, February 2026, Unreasonable Connection Going Live!
150 coworking community builders choosing “build tables for others” over “optimise personal brands.”
It’s not a ‘coworking super club’, it’s ‘find the others’. The alterative already exisits. Join the co-creation list.
Connect with today’s infrastructure builders:
Dan Sofer | Sara Anjargolian | Natasha Natarajan | Maddy Neghabian | Williamz Omope | Tash Koster-Thomas
🎙️ Listen to their stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast.