Impact Hub Athens: City Rehab via Social Change
We are Stefania Koutsoupia, Manwlis Nanouris and Romalea Ntregka, post-graduate students of MA in Cultural Management at Panteion University. As part of the Athens Co-Creation City Branding Project and under the lead of Betty Tsakarestou as our professor and project initiator, we were challenged to discover the best city-branding tactics for Athens, wondering what can make the city a strong player in the worldwide cultural field.
As part of meeting the city’s key-players, we had the pleasure to visit Impact Hub Athens, situated in a neo-classical building in the heart of Athens, where we had a briefing by one of the two co-founders, Dimitris Kokkinakis (the other one being Sophie Lamprou), who explained to us the structural context under which their initiative has developed.
First and foremost, Impact Hub is a global phenomenon and it is about social economy and the cities. It started in 2005 from London, to successfully expand in more than 80 points around the world. It consists of an international network of professionals, social entrepreneurs and organizations, artists and innovators who aim at entrepreneurial actions which look up to alleviating current social issues. If Impact Hub is about the cities –and not the countries — as well as the social impact their cultural hype can achieve, it is also about hosting and design thinking: it acts as a host, a hive offering a friendly environment in a variety of working spaces, suitable for meetings, events and co-creation, where individuals and/or teams meet up, exchange ideas, share perspectives and also, find solutions in problems they come across, while developing their business plans.
Therefore, the main fuel of Impact Hub Athens is the community (involving and including scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs etc.). As Mr Kokkinakis explained ‘‘it is not a target audience policy, it is an engage community policy’’. After all, community is about a)commitment and b)circular connection: people take lead in cultural, technological or other initiatives with a social solidarity perspective and are linked by their common purpose. Such a shared view further solidifies the connection between the people forming a strong community, which attracts further attention by the city’s inhabitants, spreading the message of social innovation. Mr Kokkinakis outlined the importance of the principal model of the theory of change, consisting of the plan: input → output → outcome → impact
Recently, the project of Kypseli Municipal Market, a century-old building recently renovated by the Municipality of Athens, was entrusted by the latter to Impact Hub for its re-opening under certain strategy: in order for it to be used for the benefit of the local community, promoting culture, innovation and creative entrepreneurship. As a result, Impact Hub has launched a series of open-calls for such projects to be hosted in the Market, applying strategic based on the components of economy, education and culture.
All in all, Impact Hub Athens is a collaborative initiative of international scope, involving young people in key factors of the social economy of the city, seeking to outline and bring out the true dynamics of Athens to be a city of cultural innovation, co-creation and social economy practices. It is very encouraging that it has bloomed through and albeit the crucial years of the Greek crisis, providing an inspirational example of new collaborative policies, which succeed to combine social and economic welfare.
