As one of the founders of Canada’s coworking movement, Ashley has worn many hats over the past 2 decades and through her consultancy Creative Blueprint has inspired a global network of catalysts and change makers, working in partnership with neighbourhood residents, community organizers, students, unions, collectives, coworking leaders, community groups, policy makers, activists and all levels of government to build bridges between individuals and industries around the world.
Ashley co-founded the Coworking IDEA project, an alliance-of-alliances called Coworking Canada (which supports the country’s indie coworking operator community), and many more organizations. For the past year or so she has worked with Deskpass to lead partnerships and growth in Canada.
For this episode of StartWell’s Gathering podcast series, we discuss virtues of coworking which can inform the practice of anyone planning how physical space can best support the needs of teams in their organisation and/or community.
Through this conversation, Ashley shares:
- Her perspective on how collaboration enables coworking cultures to thrive
- How coworking initiatives can give communities value inside a built environment which cities themselves don’t offer people
- Why megabrands like WeWork and IWG/Regus may have raised awareness of the word ‘coworking’ without relating its true meaning to their own customers/members
- The importance of dialog with people who use workspaces what they want from space and the people they share it with
- How coworking can provide people an alternative to isolating private spaces for work
- How teams who book meeting space through Deskpass end up discovering Coworking spaces and larger possibilities for their work days through them