Holding community space
I sat down to write an essay about what I’ve learned from running a community space the last few years, and the imposter syndrome hit before I even typed the first letter. What do I know?? And who wants to take lessons from the guy whose space shut down? Doesn’t that make me the worst person to give advice?
But goddamn it, I have learned some things about community spaces! A lot of things! And here’s the first one, before I get into specifics:
JUST START.
You’re never going to get it perfectly right the first time. There will never be the perfect space, or the perfect financial model, or the perfect moment. You have to be just crazy enough to believe that it’s gonna work out, jump into the deep end, and figure it out along the way. If you want to be talked into taking the leap, give me a call and I’ll hype you up. The world needs more of these friendly, people-oriented spaces.
But let’s back up a little bit.
What is a community space?
Let me define what I mean by “community space,” since it could mean all sorts of things. I believe community spaces are defined by their purpose:
The purpose of a community space is to give people a place to gather, connect, and belong, usually centered around a particular set of activities, interests, and/or beliefs.
Homes, gardens, workshops, farms, and warehouses can all become community spaces…really, any space where people can gather regularly and that they can have some agency over will work! The beauty of a good community space is that it feels alive: its members can constantly improve and adapt the space to their needs and interests. Slow, constant change is a good sign, I think.
(A community space can be physical or online, but I’m mostly focusing on in-person spaces in this piece, since that’s what I have the most experience with. But Foster’s writing circles are a great example of an online community space!)
Who am I?
And why should you listen to what I have to say about community spaces?
For the last few years, I built and ran a space in Brooklyn called Highside Workshop. It was a multipurpose space that hosted everything from concerts to art galleries to motorcycle repair workshops to tattoo popups. I don’t know how many events we ran, but I’d guess pushing a hundred, and there were constantly people coming in and out for band practices, to work on cars and motorcycles, or just to hang out.
When I got the warehouse that became Highside Workshop, I had basically no plan – I just knew I wanted to create a place for my creative and talented friends to come do their thing, no matter what that was. Space is hard to come by in New York City, especially space without many rules around what you’re allowed to do in it. I spent the first six months gutting and redoing the place with the help of a few friends, because it was disgusting and badly water-damaged, and then started inviting people to come there and work on projects, host events, and bring their friends.
Things took a little while to get rolling, but eventually a friend of a friend (now one of my closest friends) suggested we throw a concert – he’s a local musician and booked the artists, and I helped organize and run it. To our complete surprise, lots of people showed up and seemed to have an absolute blast! From there, things snowballed and we were off to the races.
There is more to the story, but skipping ahead: we had our final show in August, and Highside has since closed. I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the last few years, thinking about what worked and what didn’t, and trying to pinpoint where the magic of the place came from. Because there was some ineffable sense of magic there. In the wake of our last show, a truly shocking number of people told me things about their personal relationship to Highside that were almost hard for me to believe: that it was their favorite place on Earth, that they felt able to be themselves there in a way that they didn’t feel anywhere else, that they were having a hard time imagining finding another community where they feel so safe and welcome. That some of the best memories of their lives are there, that they unlocked new versions of themselves there, that Highside is where they learned that it’s ok to take chances and fail.
And so I have to wonder: what made all that possible? There was no explicit structure to the community at all, no rules, hardly any regularly scheduled events, no group practices or rituals, nothing. I also wonder how I can help make it more likely that there will be more spaces like Highside in the world. So that’s what the rest of this piece is about. What makes a community space thrive?
(Also, prepare yourself: I’m going to say “the space” a truly staggering number of times.)
Trust
People aren’t used to being trusted. Most of us are used to others assuming that we’re not trustworthy, and so we’re defensive by default. That’s why treating someone as if they are trustworthy before getting any proof of it is powerful: it throws them out of their default framing and gives them the opportunity to become the person you’re trusting them to be.
In practice, this means making the space vulnerable. It means giving people opportunities to hurt the space and trusting that they won’t. I didn’t move all the expensive, delicate things out of sight during events at Highside…there were tools, computers, and motorcycles easily accessible all around the space. Nothing was locked up or hidden. It was a gamble, but it paid off: people felt at home there. Home is one of the few places where most of us don’t feel the need to protect our belongings from carelessness or theft, and it’s really relaxing to put down that guard. By making it visibly obvious that my guard was down, by not protecting my belongings, others knew it was safe to put down their guards too.
Another way to show trust is by giving people opportunities to do things they don’t have direct experience doing, and only helping as much as they really need. Our first concert: the friend who booked it had never booked a show before, nor hosted one. Another friend wanted to do food-related events but had never been a chef in charge of a whole evening…I just told her she could run an event any time she wanted, and I’d help with the logistics. There were others, too. And almost every time, it went great! People rose to the occasion, and if they needed help, there were lots of us around to help them.
Of course, trusting by default means you occasionally get burned. Sometimes people flake, or don’t do what they said they were going to do, or don’t treat the space with respect. But there’s so much more to gain by trusting people than there is to lose by them breaking that trust. I’d rather give people the opportunity to live up to my trust and sometimes be proven wrong, than assume the worst and occasionally be proven right.
Only by making a space vulnerable can you fully invite people into it.
Belonging
Trust is a prerequisite for belonging. Belonging is the sense that you have every right to be where you are, that you don’t need permission or approval to be welcome. This is a rare feeling – with most things we do outside of our homes, there’s an expectation that we have to do something to be welcome. That something might be spending money (at cafes, restaurants, gyms, venues), or participating in a specific activity (hobbyist groups, political events, adult ed classes). There’s nothing wrong with those sorts of places and events – they form a big part of public life – but with a community space, we’re going for something different. We want the members of the community to feel like they’re welcome there anytime, for any reason, regardless of whether or not there’s anything specific going on.
Space for serendipitous gatherings causes people to meet who might not otherwise cross paths, and allows the community to grow its own ideas and uses for the space, unconstrained by the specifics of a particular event. And plus, people want places to hang out that expose them to unexpected interactions! How cool and unusual is it to have a place where you can just be, and feel welcome to talk to anyone else who happens to be there?
There’s a catch-22 here, though: if the space needs to make money, but we want people to feel a sense of belonging that transcends any entry fee, what can we do? There’s no perfect solution, but something that worked well at Highside was going wayyyyy above and beyond in making sure that everyone who came to an event had everything they needed to feel cared for, comfortable, and welcome.
Here’s what that looked like in practice.
For people who rented the space for an event, that meant talking through their needs in depth before the day of the event, and making sure we supplied everything they needed on the day of. It meant doing the whole setup and teardown process with them, helping them problem-solve and running errands if need be. It meant not charging them for little extras that we easily could have charged for. Basically, we helped the people who rented the space the way we would have helped our best friends, even if they were total strangers.
To make concert attendees feel cared for, we often charged less than we could have for tickets. We made all our drinks with good alcohol and sold them at below-market prices. We (the people overseeing events) were always in and out of the crowd, dancing and talking to people and making sure they saw that we were here to un-self-consciously have a good time, implicitly telling them that they could safely let go.
When we needed to hire event staff, we paid them more than we needed to, and paid them fast.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Be present, be attentive, and give more of yourself than anyone would expect.
Once people feel like they belong, cool and surprising things start to happen.
Agency
Many people have not had the experience of trying something difficult and uncertain that’s aligned with their interests and having it go well. Usually the biggest barrier standing in their way isn’t anything to do with their capability – it’s their beliefs about their own level of capability. They don’t try, because they think they will fail and that failing is bad. This is well trodden ground, so I won’t go into too much more detail here, except as it relates to community spaces.
A space that puts community ahead of finances can give people the time and space and (most importantly) encouragement they need to Just Do Things. I saw this over and over at Highside: someone would be talking about their interests (music, cooking, whatever) and hint at wanting to put on an event related to that interest, but as soon as I said “let’s do it!” they would backtrack out of fear it wouldn’t go well. But usually if we encouraged them, told them we wouldn’t care if it didn’t go perfectly, offered to help with the logistics, and generally propped up their confidence, they would try their hardest and the event would go way better than they had imagined. Sometimes it took months of prodding someone to get them to commit to doing it, but they always came out of it happy that they had, and with a new sense of capability and empowerment.
Community spaces can provide both the physical space and the social backstopping and encouragement that many people need to develop a sense of agency in their life. That agency then coalesces in the space, and the space itself develops a feeling of agency within it. A community space with an embodied sense of “yes we can” allows more prosocial and agentic versions of people to emerge, which in turn enables the community to continue creating the conditions for its own success.
Abundance
Community spaces seem pretty similar to traditional brick-and-mortar businesses at first glance. They both need to attract people who want to use them, and they both need to earn more than they spend. But community spaces are also very different from normal businesses in a few important ways.
Businesses need paying customers to survive. Community spaces need…community! And that changes the money conversation in a big way.
I don’t think community spaces should optimize for making money unless they absolutely have to. There’s a certain magic to making less money than you could – the people in the space feel that they’re getting “more than they’re paying for,” which is a rare experience in the economic landscape we live in. I hesitate to even frame it in those terms, because it reduces the whole experience to something financial, which is the opposite of my point. Another way of thinking about it is that the quality of the experience is detached from the cost of being there, which pushes us out of our usual relationship with the world and each other, and into something more connected and generative.
Businesses exist in a world of financial transactions. People support the business by paying for its products and services, and the business gets what it needs by using that money to pay for everything: employees, supplies, etc. For the most part, people don’t expect to have a relationship with a business beyond: pay money, get something. There are certainly traditional businesses that people have an emotional connection with, but the way people express that connection is by being patrons of the business – the very word patron implies a financial relationship.
The relationships between a community space and its members are totally different. So are their expectations. If you (as a community space-holder) play your cards right, the members of your community will be there because of a sense of belonging. People don’t want a transactional relationship with their community, and that means that they will contribute their time, money, and resources in ways that don’t “make sense” in economic terms. Some examples of this that I’ve seen:
Dozens of people gave their time, whether a few hours or days and days, with no expectation of…anything, really. Cleaning, renovation, event management, bookings, designing promotional materials, social media management…you name it, someone did it for Highside for free.
Other people spent thousands to improve Highside without being asked. People paid for dumpsters and carpeting during renovations, sound and lighting equipment once we’d had a few concerts, woodworking tools for framing and building shelving, etc.
The vast majority of our events were planned, booked, and attended by people who heard about us through word of mouth. The people who came here felt at home, and so they invited others.
In rent negotiations with my landlord, I offered a number $X above what I was paying, and he responded with $X / 2.
None of this is to imply that community spaces shouldn’t try to make money at all – absent a benefactor, most spaces will need to make some money to stay afloat. The point is that money isn’t the point, it’s just a means to an end…and that end is the sense of belonging the community feels in that space. Generating more belonging with less money means the space can be more resilient, more generous, and build an ever-greater feeling of abundance.
Purpose
We’ve done a lot talking about how community spaces should exist, but they also need to figure out why they exist – a shared purpose or interest that the community coalesces around. This could be anything, broad or narrow: local mutual aid, bicycles, regenerative agriculture, writing, music, repair, you name it. The purpose of the space can (and should!) shift and evolve over time, as the community evolves around it, but some kind of explicit direction helps steer the ship and makes it clear to people how to interact with the space.
This was, I think, one of the biggest mistakes I made with Highside. I wanted it to be everything for everybody, but in retrospect that didn’t work very well. Once we accidentally sort of became a venue, most people thought of us as a venue, and there are a particular set of ways in which people are used to interacting with venues that don’t lend themselves well to building a self-sustaining, self-governing community. And once people imagined us as a venue, it was hard to get people to form another picture of us in their heads.
Another important aspect of having a purpose is so that the core group that’s dedicating lots of time and energy to the space stays engaged. This was another aspect of the mistake I mentioned: I began to feel checked out, because I didn’t really get Highside to run a venue – I got it to have a place to work on my own projects. And I didn’t have the time or space to do that when there were regularly 60-120 people there. If I were to do things over again, I would have built a narrative of Highside as a place for making art and building and repairing things…and maybe we would have had the occasional concert, but that wouldn’t have been the focus. Maybe you do want to have a space focused on music – awesome! Make it clear from the start that that’s why people should come there, and create opportunities for more intimate connection than is possible at a full-blown concert (songwriter nights, open studio time, jam sessions, and space to just chill and talk).
All that said, I think there are difficult-to-implement but very, very cool opportunities to be found in creating multidisciplinary community spaces. Incredible cross-pollination can happen if there are people with very different interests from different walks of life all working together and spending time in the same spot. Making it happen would take a very particular kind of (well subdivided) physical space, multiple philosophically aligned subcommunities, and people taking on leadership roles in each of those subcommunities. In my eyes, this is the holy grail of community space-making.
Obviously, I haven’t gotten into the practical concerns of running a community space (funding models, governance, etc). There’s a lot more to talk about, and I’m working on a much longer version of this piece that goes deeper into those topics, but I think that the principles I laid out above set a good foundation for guiding much of the practical, day-to-day work of building and maintaining a community space.
Again, if thinking about the details is getting in the way of just getting started, then forget everything I wrote, find a space that’ll work well enough, and start inviting people to it. In the end, spending time with other people is the most important thing. Everything else comes from that.
Good luck, and have fun!
Jesse Evers is a Foster contributor. He writes at jesseevers.com.
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