Your coworking space is mental health infrastructure

In this week's news:

• What came up at the Coworking Alliance Summit
• Coworking as mental health infrastructure
• Loneliness, housing and place
• Portugal, Ireland, London - same fight
• Fixing the front door (member joining journey)
• What's on over in London
• 🌈 Pride
• Back the work as a Coworking Community Builder

What came up at the Summit

We ran the Coworking Alliance Summit this week. 50-odd operators from all over, online for a few hours.

Two things came up in the breakouts.

One was about what we measure. We all track desks and occupancy because it's the easiest number to point to. But it doesn't tell the whole story. The harder numbers are who turned up, who stayed, and whose business survived because the space was there.

Another was how much of the best marketing happens offline. Everyone's killing themselves over the algorithm while the spaces that stand out are just loud about who they are. A sign in the street. A booth at the local fair. One space rides a branded bike round town.

We also had people join from coworking spaces in Gaza to share what they're doing. We met these folks through Space4 and Founders and Coders, who have been working in that part of the world for years.

To get the backstory, listen to our May 2025 podcast with Dan Sofer from Founders and Coders.

Coworking as mental health infrastructure

The industry's busy with AI, fifteen-grand espresso machines, and neon "hustle" signs on the wall.

Men aged 50 to 54 have the highest suicide rate in the UK. Most of them will never sit in front of a therapist.

They might walk into a room on a Tuesday where someone asks, "How are you out of ten?"

The libraries, the community halls, the youth clubs - all gutted over the last ten years. Those rooms closed, but people still need somewhere to go. Half of us are too busy playing landlord to notice we're running the thing that keeps people alive. It's why Talk Club inside a coworking space matters as much as it does.

I wrote the whole argument up this week on LinkedIn:

Your Coworking Space Is Someone’s Mental Health Infrastructure

LinkedIn Show Notes #53 from the Coworking Values Podcast Bullpen. 🎙️ Listen to these stories and hundreds of others on the Coworking Values Podcast The FOUNDRY in Poole is housed in a brutalist-era 1960s shopping centre.

LinkedInBernie J Mitchell

Loneliness, housing and place

There's an online session on 10 June, 12-1pm, run by the Campaign to End Loneliness. It's a discussion on loneliness, housing and place, chaired by Susan Hunter from Befriending Networks, and what comes out of it gets fed into the APPG on Tackling Loneliness and Connecting Communities.

This is the table we should be at! A coworking space is one of the few places left where someone goes from alone to not alone in an afternoon. If you can make the hour, turn up.

Loneliness, Housing and Place: an opportunity to inform the APPG on Tackling Loneliness and Connecting Communities - Tacking Loneliness

Date and time: 10th June 12-1pm Chair: Susan Hunter, Chief Executive Officer of Befriending Networks, co-chair of the Scottish Forum on Social Isolation and Loneliness, advisory group member of the Campaign to End Loneliness, and member of the Scottish Volunteering Forum This webinar will be an interactive session offering participants the opportunity to discuss the […]

Tacking LonelinessTackling Loneliness Hub

Portugal, Ireland, London - same fight

Last weekend I was at my friend Maria's coworking and co-living space, Nowhere Desk, in Arcos de Valdevez, with a group from the European Coworking Assembly.

I keep finding more and more similarities between running a space in a London neighbourhood and running one in a rural setting, whether that's a village in Ireland or a village in Portugal.

Same question: how do you keep the doors open without pricing out the people you opened for? Same answer: stop selling desks and start being the reason people don't have to leave town.

From my notes:

• You can have 50,000 people living within five miles and still be begging for members. We pour everything into our audience and forget our neighbours.
• Post an event on social and you get the grab-and-goers. Email your list and you get the people who build the place.
• Coworking on its own rarely pays the bills. Nearly everyone in that room runs a second business underneath it to keep the lights on.

#communityisthekey #coworkinglondon #unreasonableconnection | Bernie J Mitchell

​🇵🇹This weekend a group of European Coworking Assembly folks from Greece, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Portugal and me met at Nowhere Desk in Arcos de Valdevez to talk coworking community building. 🌞 I’ve now know some of these people more than a decade and have met at events all over Europe and the UK. What a blast to have them all in the same place in the sunshine. ​ ✍️ My scribbled notes told me we covered things like: ​ - Why so many spaces pour everything into their Instagram and still can’t fill the desks. You can have 50,000 people living within five miles and still be begging for members. We educate our audience and forget our neighbours. ​- The email list nobody talks about. Put an event on social media and you get the grab-and-goers. Email your list and you get the people who actually build the place. Your list is your community. Your follower count isn’t. ​- The grab-and-go problem. People who turn up to harvest contacts and vanish, while the same small handful quietly hold the whole thing together for everyone else. ​- The bit that gets skipped over about revenue: coworking on its own rarely pays the bills. Almost everyone in that room runs a second business underneath it to keep the lights on. ​ - Community, not service. The strange reality that grown adults will treat a shared space like a hotel - down to who’s replacing the toilet roll - and why some operators now make people sign a charter of values on day one. ​ - The funding most operators have never heard of, built around the “right to stay” - money for places that can prove people don’t have to leave their town to build a life. ​ - Councils that open a coworking space with no idea how it works, watch it sit empty, then beg the operators down the road to rescue it before they have to hand the grant back. ​And the NEXT chance to get together is this week on Wednesday 3rd, online, for the Coworking Alliance Summit with Ashley, Hector and myself, with Peter Block joining us to ‘set the seen’ on gathering and listening to one another in life the Universe and everything. 💚 Details: https://lnkd.in/eP_r4wKV ✅ Pro tip: If you are a coworking space owner or community manager check the Friday’s London Coworking Assembly news, or yesterday’s ‘Monday Shot’ or the WhatsApp group for the code join. #communityisthekey #coworkinglondon #UnreasonableConnection p.s. Shout out to the Pino Daniele singalong washing up crew 🇮🇹

LinkedInBernie J Mitchell

Fixing the front door

My mate Jane at Nexudus asked me to flag this, and it's worth an hour if you're losing people before they even sign up.

Nexudus, Pauline and Dimitar are running a live workshop on the member joining journey. It's about how someone goes from finding your space to actually booking a desk, where they drop off along the way, and how to plug the holes. Practical, not theory.

E17 in London

Walthamstow Art Trail. More than 200 artists are opening up studios, homes, cafes and workplaces across E17. Both Creative Works and Yonder are on the trail this year. Worth a wander if you're around E17!

Walthamstow Art Trail 2026: 5-14th June 2026

Walthamstow Art Trail 2026: 5-14th June 2026

ACTionism screening, 24 June. Matt and Ashton who run Yonder are putting on a screening of ACTionism. It's a film about how communities take on systems that won't budge, and what it takes to move them.

Go to this one. Watch it in the room with them and you'll see how it would work in your own coworking space, on your own street.

I know E17 well and that bit of London is unusually good at keeping the place alive and the money moving without letting the ugly, extractive version of gentrification win.

ACTIONISM - A film about the value of connection and belonging + Q&A

“A short film about the value of connection and belonging+ Q&A with star of the film Ellie & Re-Action Collective member Beccy

Eventbrite

🌈 Pride 2026

Two pieces worth your time this month.

Maggie Segrich, owber of Sesh Coworking wrote about four ways to show up for Pride that have nothing to do with a rainbow.

• Put yourself in rooms where no one looks like you.
• Listen with all five senses.
• Put your phone down.
• Use whatever privilege you've got on someone who needs it.
• None of it costs money. All of it costs attention.

4 Ways to Be a Changemaker This Pride (That Don’t Involve a Rainbow)

Pride is here. And with it comes a familiar wave of rainbows.

LinkedInMaggie Segrich

Rachel Extance shared the ILGA-Europe Rainbow Map after telling her own coming-out story.

The UK's score has dropped from 86% in 2015 to 43.9% this year. More than 30,000 hate crimes were recorded against LGBTQIA+ people in England and Wales between March 2024 and 2025. Her point is simple: the algorithm only shows you the flavour it thinks you like, so most people never see how fast it's turning.

Read her post below on LinkedIn. I know this embed of Rachel's is huge and looks disproportionate, but I don't care! 💚

The summer I came out to my parents they discussed whether to stop funding me for university. I was at the end of my first year. I'd been counting down to university for ages. It was an escape from… | Rachel Extance | 64 comments

The summer I came out to my parents they discussed whether to stop funding me for university. I was at the end of my first year. I’d been counting down to university for ages. It was an escape from my home town and a world where I didn’t fit. I’d been dating my girlfriend for a few months when my parents came to visit at the end of term and I decided it was time to come out. My parents were staying in their caravan on a site we had been to a few years before. It was how I knew where Lampeter was. When I opened my exam results and realised I wouldn’t be going to Leeds after all, Lampeter was the answer to what the next part of my life would look like. No bright lights, gay bars or clubs, but a very welcoming LGBT society and a university community that didn’t care a jot. I guess it made me complacent. Plus my girlfriend’s family had been welcoming. The campsite was in the middle of nowhere. My parents decided we would spend the day walking up a nearby mountain. My mum was absolutely furious with me. You knew not to upset mum because her temper was terrifying. And there I was, for hours, stuck on a mountain being berated for being myself. How could I? I’d promised grandchildren. The shame. Then came the summer. A summer of silence. I had always been close to my dad and he wasn’t speaking to me. One day my mum came into my room and said dad was thinking of not paying for me to go to university any more. It was a hell of a shock to discover that my liberal parents, two people who had taken in refugees, volunteered for every community event, gave up their time to do door-to-door collections for charity, and had always campaigned for better conditions for other people, were homophobic. I was devastated. My mum watched through the curtains one evening as I got into my girlfriend’s dad’s car and the three of us went to France for a couple of weeks. Over time, things got better. I did go back to Lampeter. The threats stopped. My parents discovered some of their friends also had gay children. It turned out I hadn’t been the only gay in the village after all. My parents were pleasant to my girlfriend on the odd occasion they were in the same place. I found their photos of my graduation recently and there’s my ex standing beside me in the quad. I’m sharing this story because Pride matters. Because children get rejected by their parents for being LGBTQ+ all the time. I was lucky. Mine came around (although I’m fairly sure they were happier when I ended up marrying a man). But many people discover their home, which should be a safe, welcoming place, is no longer somewhere they belong. (I’m doing something I don’t usually and continuing in the comments because apparently, this post is too long. The image is of the 2026 Rainbow Map scores which I talk about in the comments. Please go to the comments to keep reading.) | 64 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInRachel Extance

Coworking Community Builder - back the work

The London Coworking Assembly is the home of independent journalism and research for the people building coworking communities.

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The podcast, the research and the writing you just read exist because Coworking Community Builders decided to fund them. If this work matters to you, back the LCA as a Coworking Community Builder for £100 a year.

It keeps the Coworking Values Podcast free and public, unlocks the private feed (raw, unfiltered, turned up to 11), funds the Coworking Citizenship research project, pays Urban MBA students to work on our projects, and sends 10% to European Coworking Assembly projects.

The first Coworking Community Builders are already in already.