More Than a Coworking Space
In the years since Impact Hub Baltimore’s inception, the organization has served as a responsive and adaptive organization focused on the needs of their local community — from supporting local entrepreneurs to bringing people together with intention.
I spoke with Sam Novak and Irene Bantigue — Impact Hub’s Community Manager and Events & Communications Manager respectively — to learn more about how the organization catalyzes and cultivates relationships. We discuss how Connect & Treks, Member Mixers, and storytelling bring together community members and break down silos.
Noontime in Station North and sunlight floods Open Space West. The pride flag hanging in the window saturates even more as the beams sweep through. Through the speaker, Billie Holliday croons I’ll Be Seeing You over the murmur of car engines and road construction outside. The space is bright and welcoming, tropical plants vining their way around cubbies and windows.
Meanwhile, a small group of Impact Hub members and staff congregate around a dining table with their lunches, chatting about restaurants in the area, cicadas, and the meetings they’ve had. To a passerby, it might look as if these people have known each other for a long time.
Do they? Does it even matter? Community does not just happen, and neither does a sense of continued, maintained connection between disparate groups of people — nonprofit members, small business owners, social entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and more. A global pandemic, one that quite literally forces people apart, certainly does not help either.
To be a part of a city’s ecosystem is to adapt, respond, and work hand-in-hand with the other parts of the community. The need for flexibility and collaboration grounds Impact Hub’s guiding philosophy: to break down silos and create connections between groups in the city as much as possible.
Impact Hub is often thought of as just a coworking space. However, it might be more accurate to describe the space as the organization’s most tangible asset. The Impact Hub team regularly plans and programs ways to connect people outside of the space’s walls. Among more regular programming like Member Mixers and the pre-pandemic Skillshares, in 2020, Impact Hub pioneered new ways to connect the city during uncertain times.
Two such adaptations from the past year come in the form of weekday hikes or “Connect & Treks” as well as Impact Hub’s Medium. Community Manager, Sam Novak, discusses Connect & Treks and the restorative properties of nature while Events & Communications Manager, Irene Bantigue, discusses storytelling and visibility efforts. Both conversations point toward a constant evolution of the organization’s programming and response to meet the needs and desires of the community.
Get Outside: What a Hike Can Do
As the COVID-19 pandemic developed, Impact Hub reached out to its members and community to ask what they needed to feel supported during this time. The top two answers? Community and self-care.
In response, Sam Novak, Impact Hub’s Community Manager, came up with the idea for Connect & Treks — monthly hikes at various trails and green spaces in Baltimore. Sam had been leading hikes for years. What began as a work exchange for a local yoga studio eventually developed into an informal business and practice of organizing group hikes.
Sam sees Connect & Treks as a natural evolution of her expertise while also providing a critical space for people to convene during a time when getting together was dangerous. In the context of a global pandemic, hiking made sense as a medium for community-building, prioritizing one’s own self-healing, and reconnecting with nature during uncertain times.
Sam explained that she spent a lot of time figuring out how to create a space to connect during the pandemic, and how to offer something to a group of people feeling isolated due to the world’s sudden shift:
“I was excited to be able to offer [something] I knew was personally healing, had been doing for years, and that I had experience in and had some sense of expertise in what it means to hold space for people and to help them realign with the natural rhythms of the world.”
At the same time, Sam sees Connect & Treks as intrinsically tied with anti-racism work and anti-capitalism — making time for a hike based on community-building during the work day moves our priority from productivity to self-healing and work-life balance.
The most recent Connect & Trek happened at Cylburn Arboretum in June 2021. At the beginning, each participant had a chance to introduce themselves and share a little about where they were at in their lives. Many of the attendees took this opportunity to share a thought, emotion, or event with vulnerability, setting the foundation for deeper conversations.
As the hike progressed, the group shuffled between themselves and had opportunities to speak to all participants while soaking in the surrounding environment. Sam saw the relationship between self-care and community care as reciprocal.
“When you’re taking care of the community, you’re taking care of yourself. We get such a strong sense of self from being in community, from recognizing the diversity and the difference, and seeing in how you are unique in how you show up. That’s such a large part of identity [formation]. And seeing the community itself in turn becomes so much more thriving when it is diverse, and all of a sudden, you have a diverse group of people filling in each other’s gaps and supporting each other in different ways. I don’t know if there is any well-being without community.”
Connect & Treks are just one example of how Impact Hub’s organizational emphasis on adaptability enables the team to continue creating a container for meaningful connections between people, even when connecting itself was a challenge.
To Tell a Story: The Narratives that Empower Us
Impact Hub didn’t always tell its community’s stories the way it does now — that too arose as an adaptation to the pandemic.
Irene Bantigue, Impact Hub’s Events & Communications Manager, prioritizes the person, organization, or group whose story she’s writing. Before starting her interview, she has a discussion with her subject to establish their mutual goals for the story. Once she’s written her draft, she sends it back to the story’s subject who she serves as her editor. This way, she says, she knows her writing captures what the story’s subjects want the focus to be.
For Irene, telling stories becomes a different type of asset for small business, social entrepreneurs, and more. As opposed to other forms of documentation — like funder reports which are typically written for philanthropic audiences and focus on quantitative data — stories are more accessible to the public and emphasize the universal human element of these various businesses and organizations. It also creates a living document that the story’s subjects can use when promoting their initiatives, applying for funding, and more.
For Irene, storytelling is inherently tied to connection and because of that, can be wholly transformative.
“Stories are how you generate and maintain human connection with other people and break those silos. Even if you’re not carrying out your work in the same ways or fields, you might find a common interest that helps you connect with one another. Stories help inspire people to create movements. Storytelling is an inherent part of human nature and evolution — it helps us grow and transform and become inspired and recognize the ways that we are connected.”
Irene also composes Impact Hub’s newsletters. In each newsletter, she pools together news from within their team, its members, the city community, as well as opportunities with their partner organizations. This becomes yet another way to break down silos; simply by shining a light on people, events, and initiatives that might not yet have been communicated sufficiently to the public. With over 7,000 subscribers, the newsletter reaches both Impact Hub members and non-members alike. In turn, newsletters exchange resources between those involved with Impact Hub and those who are not.
Visibility is one of Irene’s chief objectives with her work, but not just in terms of metrics. As she’s worked more and more on storytelling initiatives, she’s noticed just how profoundly personal the work of so many in Baltimore is. Giving light to those personal connections and histories underlying each subject’s project or organization is also important to Irene.
Showing just how authentically invested social entrepreneurs are with their work, both materially and emotionally, can also foster relationships between individuals and initiatives.
“Even in the newsletters, [as with stories], I find that it’s not necessarily that things don’t exist or opportunities don’t exist. Instead, it’s the resource flow of things [that needs support]. Some things aren’t as elevated as others. If you can boost them or bring more light to them , then one person might benefit. And if one person can benefit from reading an inspiring story or finding a resource within the newsletter, that makes me feel good — more so than the quantitative reach.”
Plugging into Impact Hub’s stories, which is grounded in a mutually beneficial conversation between the writer and the subject; or the newsletter, which creates a community around shared news and opportunities, establishes new routes of connection in a time of separation and estrangement.
Bringing People Together: How Community is Formed
Impact Hub’s approach to community-building comes out as a response to the needs of the community around them is entirely malleable and receptive. They are an adaptive and responsive organization, one anchored, but not wholly defined, by their physical space.
While the ‘containers’ they make may take different forms, they all operate with similar goals around community-building — to be present, to meet people where they are, and to cultivate trust.
As new needs arise in the community, no doubt Impact Hub will respond and create new offerings to meet the needs of the community, the city ecosystem, and most importantly the people who make up all of these organizations. At the core of it, all organizations, non-profits, small businesses, are made up of individuals.
Providing spaces for those individuals to connect, even in nature, or to bring visibility to them with a story brings everyone closer. Focusing on relationship building, on strengthening connections between individuals, eventually occurs at larger scales and in turn, reinvigorates the whole community.
Ultimately, we are really all in this together.
Reflection Questions & Additional Reading
- Spend five minutes doing nothing but being present in nature, or sitting on the grass, or leaning against a tree. How did it make you feel?
- What stories have been important to you this week or month? Do you want to share them with others? How might you be able to do that?
- What can you do today or tomorrow to create connections between people in your community?
Enjoyed this piece?
This story is the first installment of the Designed to Be Connected Series created by Ryan Aghamohammadi, Impact Hub’s talented JHU Community Impact Intern.
The five stories making up the series cover topics ranging from member spotlights, to Impact Hub’s origins, to what it means to do ecosystem work. They can be read in order or as standalone pieces. We hope these stories serve as an introduction (or re-introduction) to Impact Hub and the people who make it up.
