LinkedIn Show Notes #28
Hey folks, it’s Bernie here.
I took the summer off from this Coworking Values Podcast companion to rethink how to do this. There is always more nourishment in a podcast episode than the twenty or so minutes you listen to; in all our show notes, you’ll find links to projects, people, events, and connections.
People from around the world risk their time and reputation to record an episode with either Emily Breder or me, and posting, sharing and forgetting always seems a crime.
So every week on a Tuesday, I’ll send you this long read’, so get comfortable and be ready to take action at the end. I know fewer of you will read this, but those few who do will get the gold, and always, always get in touch with the people in the stories.
Also, every week we post an episode in the LinkedIn Coworking Group, where more and more of you are sharing thoughts, support and links that come from listening to industry podcasts.
And it’s not just Coworking Values Podcast, our long-time mates Fanny Marcoux, Caleb Parker and Suzanne Murdock and even Marc Navarro post their podcasts there too.
Whenever you are listening to any of these folks and want to contribute, go to the LinkedIn Coworking Group and add your input there – don’t worry, you won’t be the first.
And last of all – scroll to the bottom of this post and read about the racist attack that happened to Paul and Vibushan at Oru Space in London this week.
There is a message for us all, Paul and Vibushan are the real fucking deal when it comes to being coworking community builders – I love them. đź’š
LinkedIN Show Notes – lets go
The ÂŁ300 Plane Ticket Problem
Picture this: You’re 25, university-educated, and living on an island where the economy has been in recession for over a decade. You can get on a plane for ÂŁ300 and start working anywhere on the East Coast the next day. No visa required. No paperwork. Just a plane ticket and the promise of better opportunities.
This is the reality Mariangie Rosas faced when she returned to Puerto Rico in 2015. “I felt like I was a salmon swimming against a current,” she told me, “because most people were leaving to find better opportunities.”
But Mari didn’t leave. Instead, she opened a coworking space across from a food truck park in Santurce. And in doing so, she discovered something that challenges everything we think we know about economic development: sometimes the most radical act isn’t leaving for better opportunities—it’s creating the infrastructure that makes staying possible.
This week, I’ve been thinking about three conversations that reveal how coworking spaces function as economic anchors in communities under pressure. Not the sanitised version of coworking that gets sold in business magazines, but the gritty, essential work of creating conditions where people can build livelihoods without sacrificing place.
The Puerto Rico Experiment: When Infrastructure Becomes Citizenship
Mari’s story begins at the opening of a food truck park. “This park was one of the big things that was bringing this part of town alive,” she explains. “And I was like, you know, a coworking space across the street from a food truck park area is going to be amazing.”
But what started as a real estate decision became something else entirely after Hurricane Maria hit in 2017.
“So many people would tell me constantly,” Mari recalls, “if it weren’t for co.co.haus I would not be in Puerto Rico right now because this was what let me be able to continue my business, stay open and be able to stay and not have to get on a plane and move.”
Here’s what Mari discovered: coworking isn’t real estate. “I thought coworking was real estate when I came into it,” she admits. “And when I saw the community aspect happen, I thought it was just a coincidence. It wasn’t until after the hurricane that I saw this magical thing happen.”
The magic wasn’t the WiFi or the coffee. It was creating economic infrastructure that could survive disruption. When the power went out across the island, Coco House had backup generators. When businesses struggled to stay afloat, the community provided mutual support. When professionals considered leaving, the space gave them a reason to stay.
Mari’s insight cuts to the heart of what economic development actually means: “I think it should be every economic development office’s goal to have a coworking space in every town… They should make it very easy for people to open these businesses because it will create the economic development that they want to have.”
This isn’t theory. This is someone who watched her community survive a hurricane because they had built the infrastructure for resilience before it was needed.
The London Paradox: Teaching Grandmothers to Use AI
Three thousand miles away, Ali Kakande is solving a different version of the same problem. Every Friday, Caribbean grandmothers sit around connected tables at Urban MBA in London, eating jerk chicken and learning to use ChatGPT to write complaint letters to Hackney Council.
“On paper, you think, oh, how’s a 70-year-old lady from, let’s say, Grenada going to relate to being in this tech space?” Ali asks. “Very well, actually.”
The scene sounds surreal: ÂŁ30,000 VR headsets sitting next to plates of rice and peas, teenagers building games with AI while their grandmothers learn to navigate digital bureaucracy. But Ali understands something profound about economic inclusion in the digital age.
“There is a digital divide and I’m going to include AI in that,” she explains. “I don’t want the communities that I work with to be left behind.”
This isn’t about keeping up with innovation for its own sake. It’s about maintaining agency in a system designed to exclude you. When the welfare state goes digital, digital literacy becomes a survival skill. When council services move online, knowing how to advocate for yourself digitally isn’t just a convenience—it’s a form of citizenship.
Ali’s work reveals how community infrastructure adapts to serve the people who actually live in the neighbourhood. “I can sit next to a stranger on a bus and before you know it, they’re telling me that they had heart surgery two years ago,” she says. “That’s my world. But a lot of people’s world, that’s not. And I think giving people the opportunity to connect, they will.”
The connected tables, the shared meals, the patient teaching—this is what economic infrastructure looks like when it’s designed by the people who use it rather than imposed from above.
The Rural Renaissance: AI as Economic Equaliser
In rural Devon, Stacey Sheppard is wrestling with a different kind of economic disruption. As a professional content creator and interior design blogger, she watched AI slowly erode everything she’d built over 20 years. But instead of retreating, she’s using her coworking space to help other women navigate the same transition.
🎥 Watch Stacey’s video on this in LinkedIn Coworking Group
“I’ve been really closely watching and learning about AI since ChatGPT launched in November 2022,” Stacey explains. “I could just see the potential for it to really quickly erode the career I’d been building for 20 years in writing and content creation.”
But here’s where Stacey’s story diverges from the typical narrative of technological displacement. “Because of what I do in the coworking industry, I haven’t felt alone in that. I’ve got a community around me, I’ve got other businesses around me, and I know how to pivot and be flexible and be resilient.”
The difference isn’t just personal resilience—it’s infrastructure. Stacey spends “ridiculous amounts of time finding out about all of the business support that is available, ringing up the different departments, the different organisations that are offering the funded business support, all of these different programmes, trawling through Eventbrite, signing up to newsletters just to find out about these things so that I can give that information to the people in my community.”
This is economic development in practice: one person doing the work of connecting people to resources they didn’t know existed. “If you’re a solopreneur or a small business and you’re working alone at home,” Stacey points out, “you’re not going to have access to that.”
Her insight about government spending is particularly sharp: “There are all these six-week boot camps or small week-long sessions on how to do every aspect of running a business when you’re first starting… But the problem is they finish after six weeks or eight weeks or twelve weeks or whatever it is. Then you’re left with enormous amounts of information on all the things that you need to do and implement to start and grow a business. Then the course ends and you’re out on your own again.”
Coworking spaces fill that gap. They provide the ongoing support, accountability, and peer mentoring that makes the difference between learning about business and actually building one.
The Pattern That Emerges
What connects Ali in London, Mari in Puerto Rico, and Stacey in Devon isn’t just coworking—it’s a shared understanding that economic development happens through community infrastructure, not individual heroics.
Each of them has discovered that the most effective economic development isn’t about attracting outside investment or competing for mobile capital. It’s about creating conditions where people can build sustainable livelihoods in the places they want to live.
Mari puts it most directly: “If we don’t do it, other people are going to move in and they’re going to dictate what the future of the island is. And they’re not necessarily coming with the best intentions… it should be locals should be leading a lot more efforts.”
This is what economic sovereignty looks like in practice. Not grand policy statements, but the daily work of creating infrastructure that serves the people who actually live in a place.
- The three conversations reveal a pattern that challenges conventional thinking about economic development:
- Infrastructure First, Jobs Second: Instead of trying to attract employers, create the conditions that allow people to create their own work.
- Community Before Capital: Social Infrastructure—the Connections Between People—Matters More Than Financial Infrastructure.
- Local Knowledge, Global Tools: The most effective solutions combine deep local understanding with access to global resources and markets.
- Resilience Through Redundancy: Multiple small enterprises connected through community infrastructure prove more resilient than single large employers.
3 Resources Worth Your Time
🔍 Virtual Offices: Know Before You Go
Virtual offices keep coming up in operator conversations, but the compliance reality is murky. AML regulations, KYC requirements, local authority rules—it’s a proper maze.
At the London Coworking Assembly we’re worked with Nexudus to create a guide that maps out where you actually stand on Virtual offices.
It takes approximately 4 to 5 minutes, providing a clear score on compliance gaps and practical next steps.
It’s not legal advice, just industry research made practical. No sales pitch attached—we figured if London coworking space owners and operators are going to explore virtual offices anyway, better to do it with proper information.
👶 Pregnancy, Parenthood & Coworking
Elena Giroli and Sheya Michaelides from Creative Works Space wrote this thoughtful piece about creating inclusive spaces for parents and expecting parents. Essential reading for anyone serious about building truly accessible communities.
Read the Article on LinkedIn →
🤝 Unreasonable Connection
September 17th, Small groups of Coworking Community Builders talking in small groups—only for owners and community managers.
No sponsors. No frameworks. No gimmicks. But you need to bring your own snacks.
On Google Meet – Wednesday 17 September, 2–3 PM BST.
The Question That Won’t Go Away
As I think about these three conversations, one question keeps surfacing: What would happen if every local authority recognised coworking spaces as essential economic infrastructure rather than lifestyle businesses?
Stacey’s observation haunts me: “The impact of that investment from government and local councils could be amplified so much more if we just connected the dots.”
She’s right. Local governments spend enormous amounts on business support programmes that end after six weeks, leaving people with information but no ongoing community.
Meanwhile, coworking spaces provide exactly the wraparound support, peer mentoring, and resource sharing that make the difference between learning about business and actually building one.
Mari’s experience in Puerto Rico proves the point. When Hurricane Maria hit, it wasn’t the government programmes that kept businesses running—it was the community infrastructure that had been built through relationships, shared resources, and mutual support.
Ali’s work in London demonstrates how this infrastructure adapts to serve the people who need it most. Teaching Caribbean grandmothers to use AI isn’t just about digital inclusion—it’s about maintaining agency in a system that’s rapidly digitalising without them.
The pattern is clear: coworking spaces work best when they function as civic infrastructure rather than commercial real estate. They create the conditions where people can build economic security without sacrificing place-based identity.
This isn’t the sanitised version of coworking that gets sold in business magazines. This is the essential work of building economic resilience from the ground up, one conversation at a time.
This newsletter expands on conversations from the Coworking Values Podcast. If these stories resonate with you, consider joining our community of operators who believe coworking can be a force for economic justice.
Listen to the full conversations:
Stacey Sheppard’s is published, and Ali Kakande and Mari Rosas are coming next to the Coworking Values Podcast.
Emily Breder and I publish the Coworking Values Podcast every Tuesday and Thursday.
🎙️ Link in the Show Notes is published weekly, exploring the deeper currents beneath coworking’s surface. No business fluff, just the conversations that matter.
đź’š Before you go
As I was writing this today Paul Hepworth Nelmes posted about a pile of racial abuse he and Vibushan Thirukumar had received about Oru Space – one of their coworking spaces in London.
If someone said half of these things about me, I’d be in tears and not leave my bedroom for a week.
The silence surrounding that post from the coworking community is deafening. As soon as something a bit sensitive, like racism, wealth inequality, or inclusion, is brought up in coworking, people either fall silent or don’t know how to respond. And yet — this is exactly what “challenging the status quo” looks like. In London, racism remains the status quo. Here’s the chance for our industry to show that those words aren’t just marketing copy.
Paul and Vibushan and Oru Space are one of my consistent ‘go-to’s’ for how to build a local community space, they are the real fucking deal.
Please send them a quiet DM or, if you could visit Paul’s post and click the ‘support’ button, that would be greatly appreciated – click here.
And be sure to include it in your weekly industry round-ups đź‘Ť
Thank you for your time and attention today – that was a big one!