Why Newburyport Needs a Coworking Location

With a mission to catalyze local talent, local ideas, and local capital to create products, services, and solutions for the global marketplace, NextSpace of Santa Cruz, California is an example of a coworking business which I’d like to find, if not form, here in Newburyport.

In recent weeks, numerous like-minded entrepreneurs, ranging from their early twenties to fiftysomethings and above, either approached me or agreed with me that this city of 17,000 needs a location where pajama-clad individuals can dress more casually and–along the lines of setting up shop at a Starbucks table–can cowork, or work collaboratively to be more productive than solo.

It oughtn’t be hard to tap into the collective of creativity and innovation–after all, the United States Coast Guard was born here–to either inquire if community banks or other businesses would be willing to sponsor a site or determine the applicability of creating a new business myself. Maybe a bunch of us can be co-partners. Strength in numbers.

There are coworking sites nearby in Ipswich, Salem, and Lowell. Why not here?

If nothing else, we can work at Jelly, as the below video highlights:

As Ryan Kuder writes about NextSpace, They like to think of themselves like a healthclub, but for working, not working out. Sounds good to me!

Eva Schweber, co-owner of Portland, Oregon’s CubeSpace, operating in the same industry as NextSpace, shared her insights in a recent article at the Web Worker Daily:

We are still in the early days of coworking, and it remains a foreign concept to many. People who work in tech have become comfortable with non-traditional work spaces because the dot-com era changed the office paradigm. That is why we have seen tech workers on the leading edge of coworking. The economic downturn has made people much more price-sensitive. The high unemployment rate is creating more business startups whose owners are desperately seeking support and community. Those two elements combined are strong incentives for people to look beyond what they are familiar with and venture into coworking spaces. The industry will have to evolve to meet the needs of these new populations, but it is hard to predict exactly what will change.

There will likely be more traditionally “professional looking” coworking spaces. The shortage of jobs for recent college graduates will produce more young entrepreneurs who are looking for the mentorship that used to come from their employers. The range of services coworking spaces offer will increase as the coworking population diversifies.

Whether a location like NextSpace, CubeSpace, or Jelly, the fact remains Newburyport has nothing–and there is a collective interest for something.

For the right environment, I’d pay $125 a month for a 12-month commitment. Maybe less, maybe more. Wouldn’t you?

I suppose the next thing to do is begin figuring out who’s truly interested so we can set the wheels rolling to create something.

Photo credit: noneck

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Tagged as: culture, ideas, productivity

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