Holding community space

An incomplete guide to building community spaces.

Jesse Evers

Jesse Evers

— 24 min read

I plan to update this piece as I find new resources and get feedback on what’s missing. If you have anything to add, don’t be shy! DM me on Twitter or send me an email.

Table of contents

Introduction

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.

If we’re talking about what makes a community space, it’s important to talk about what community spaces aren’t, too. They’re not profit-first businesses, which sounds obvious but is counterintuitive in practice, since they do usually have to make money. This creates a tension between staying true to the space’s purpose (serving its community as a place of togetherness and belonging) and staying alive (making enough money to continue). I touch on these issues in Community space philosophy and Funding models.

Who am I?

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 2024, 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 couldn't 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? And practically speaking, what decisions do you need to make when creating one?

(Also, prepare yourself: I’m going to say “the space” a truly staggering number of times.)

Community space philosophy

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.

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 repeatedly at Highside: someone would talk 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 a collectively 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

I’ve written a lot 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, fixing bicycles, regenerative agriculture, writing, music, 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 with other musicians).

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.

I want to be clear that this principle applies to creating community spaces specifically, and not necessarily to creating community in general. I don’t think having a highly specific purpose is the best way to build communities of place, like a particularly well-connected neighborhood or village (a la Fractal). That kind of community depends on people continuing to feel connected even if their specific interests or priorities shift, and on their feeling like the community context will support them in the long term. I think community spaces are downstream of communities of place: in an ideal world, a neighborhood might have many community spaces, each fulfilling a different need or interest in the broader community.

Transparency

I firmly believe that transparency underlies all the other values I’ve described here. If the would-be community doesn’t know the principles, purpose, and financial situation of the space, it’s hard for them to know how to engage with it.

I think financial transparency is particularly disarming, in a world where finances are usually taboo…being transparent about the costs of keeping the space alive and how any income is being spent makes it so that community members can make an informed decision about how much to contribute. When I first made it clear that Highside was in financial trouble, we got a few thousand dollars of donations in the first couple days. That’s a few thousand dollars that we never would have seen had I kept our finances under wraps (and I probably left thousands on the table by not exposing our finances sooner).

Personal transparency from the organizers is key, too – being honest with themselves, each other, and everyone else about how things are going. The more everyone knows where everyone else is at, the easier it is for people to know how they can plug in and help. It’s hard to support each other if we don’t know who needs support. The other good effect of emotional transparency from the organizers is that it implicitly gives everyone else permission to share what they’re feeling, too. I’m not breaking new ground here – it’s a basic tenet of leadership to behave in the way you would the people around you to behave – but in this case, that cliché dovetails well with the broader principle of transparency.

I could have done a better job of this, and if I had, Highside might have lasted longer. I felt like I should be able to keep up with everything myself, even though that clearly wasn’t going to happen, so I found myself overworked, stressed out, and frustrated that I wasn’t getting more help. But how could I expect help if I didn’t share what I needed?

Funding models

Figuring out how to fund a community space is one of the primary challenges of keeping one alive. A large part of the value in these spaces is not a sort of value that can easily be converted into money – the social connections between the members of the space is the most valuable thing about the space, but social connection alone is a hard thing to monetize, and trying to monetize it can easily destroy the conditions that created the connections in the first place.

The question is, then, how to make enough money to keep the space alive while not ruining its magic? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but a good place to start is thinking about the different possible funding models. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Membership

This is the simplest option. By charging people who want to spend time in the space some sort of monthly or yearly fee, it’s possible to get a pretty reliable sense of how much money you’ll be making over the course of the year. The hard part is figuring out what exactly to offer the members of your space, and figuring out how to get them to engage with the governance of the space (if that’s what you want them to do…more on that below). Do they have all-hours access? If not, who gets to do what, and when? Can people leave things there? (Probably not, unless it’s a very small group.) Are there different tiers of membership?

One big difference between the sorts of memberships most people are used to (the gym, wholesale grocery stores, etc) and memberships for community spaces is that community space memberships involve responsibilities, not just privileges. It is not possible to have a community space if the members are passive consumers of the space, expecting that they are paying their membership in exchange for not needing to do any work. Work is an inherent part of the web of relationships that keeps the community alive. And if there are different membership tiers, it should be that the more access someone has to the space, the more responsibility they have to the space, too.

There also needs to be a mechanism for non-members to get introduced to the space and the community. Hosting regular events that are open to everyone is a great way to do that, as is running workshops or classes with public sign-ups.

Nonprofit

A non-profit is often a natural form for a community space to take, since making a profit is usually not the main purpose of the space. Nonprofits are great if you plan to solicit donations as a primary form of income, since one of the main advantages of nonprofits (at least in the US) is that donations to them are tax-deductible.

That said, there’s a lot of administrative overhead and initial startup costs to becoming a nonprofit, so unless one of the founding members of the space has experience with this path, I think it’s often overkill, particularly at first. You can always become a nonprofit later, but don’t let the difficulties of obtaining nonprofit status prevent you from starting at all!

If you want nonprofit status but don’t care about being your own nonprofit, there’s something called fiscal sponsorship, where all your finances flow through an already-approved nonprofit, and their nonprofit status is passed down to your organization. They usually charge some percentage (7-15%) of total donations to pay for the administrative work, insurance, etc that is required to run the legal side of the nonprofit.

Business-ish

While I spent a long time describing how community spaces are different from businesses, it’s still possible to have a space that uses a semi-traditional business model to support itself! A co-op is often a good option here. There are community spaces that provide services, albeit usually at lower cost and with profit as mostly a means for the space to continue existing. A great example of this is the Bradley Street Bike Co-op. They fix up and sell old bikes, fix other people’s bikes, teach people how to fix their own bikes, and hold small events. Like a normal bike shop, they make money from bike sales and service fees…but they also offer memberships for people who want to fix their own bikes there, and host regular community events.

The danger here is falling into the mentality of a regular business, and profit-maximizing for the sake of it. This is a surprisingly easy mistake to make – we ran into it at Highside at one point – and it can easily kill the magic that is what makes community spaces so special. Holding space for serendipity and community has to come before making money as much as possible.

Benefactor

This is, in many ways, the best option: find someone who’s rich enough to float the whole project. I’m not going to spend too much time on this, because it’s not an option that’s available to most people, but there definitely are ultra-rich people out there who want to spend their money on creating cool spaces that they then have social capital in as a result. Meowwolf exists because one of its creators knew George R. R. Martin (the writer of Game of Thrones), and convinced him to buy a whole warehouse for a group of artists to do crazy, creative things in. These situations do exist.

I’ve never been in this situation myself, but one thing that I think would be critical with a benefactor is setting guardrails in place from the beginning to ensure that they don’t have excessive control over the direction of the whole space. A community space ceases to be a community space if it actually only exists to serve one person.

On the fringes

Money is the barrier that prevents a lot of incredibly cool things from happening. One way that us weirdos have been getting around this limitation for decades is by subverting the world’s usual financial systems. The most salient examples of this are temporary communities like the Rainbow Gathering or the Occupy camps, where people find (found) a way to exist mostly outside the money economy by giving everything away. Obviously, this has limitations, but you can take it pretty far.

Squatting is also an option in this category: find an unused or abandoned building and stay in it long enough that you own it. This is more or less possible depending where you live, but it’s worth looking into. If it’s in a rural enough place, it might not even matter what the squatting laws are, because no one will ever be there to see what’s going on.

The less intense incarnation of this strategy is to, uh, not worry too much about zoning and getting permits and following all the laws, as long as you’re not truly endangering anyone. The strategy of asking forgiveness instead of permission is all but mandatory when you’re building something that is outside the bounds of what is “normal.” The rules were not made to accommodate community spaces that prioritize people over profit!

This is very much what made Highside possible. We never got a single building permit, nor event permit, nor…well, I don’t think we got a single permit for anything the whole time. The building was not zoned to live in, or to hold events in, but I lived in it and we held tons of events. We ran a full bar at almost every concert, without a liquor license. The reason it worked is because we made sure everyone was taken care of, including our neighbors…we cleaned up trash in the neighborhood, we were super friendly, and we helped the neighbors out whenever we could. In return, they didn’t give us a hard time. We made sure everyone at the events felt safe and comfortable, and no one ever got mad at us or made a scene. The one time someone submitted a complaint about the building, the inspector showed up, saw that we were doing something cool, and let it slide. 

I’m not suggesting you do anything illegal…but I encourage you to get creative ;)

Community size

A space will look wildly different if it’s intended for just a few people to live or work in compared to a space that’s meant to host dozens or hundreds of people. It’s important to be clear about what you want to do before you get a physical space, because moving is a biiiiig pain (and sometimes not really possible).

Everyone knows everyone

This is an intimate, probably invite-only space. There might be somewhere between three and twelve people involved (obviously those are not hard boundaries). Everyone has enough context on everyone else to make it easy to establish group norms, learn each person’s preferences and interpersonal style, and operate with a high level of trust almost 100% of the time. This scale includes projects like co-living houses, farms, and small groups of people working on the same social issue or business.

This size is great because relatively little time needs to be spent getting people comfortable in the space and up to speed on the group’s agreed-upon processes – there aren’t many people coming and going – but it can be difficult if there’s one or two people who consistently aren’t on the same page as everyone else. 

Small core, big fringes

This setup fits a lot of spaces, including any space that has memberships or holds events. It’s a lot of work to run a community space, and (hopefully) a core group of deeply committed people will form to handle that work. Everyone outside that core group will engage with the space on a spectrum: from being there several times a week, to attending an event once every three months.

The core group will end up doing most of the decision-making (and most of the work), but it’s important to create a mechanism for the people on the fringes to make their way inward. Finding a way to give everyone in the community a clear opportunity to take on more responsibility in the space is how the space stays alive in the long term. People’s priorities and circumstances change, so the core group cannot stay static forever.

Congregation

I stole this term from Microsolidarity. A space that’s structured as a congregation might be a bigger farm, an organization with multiple active working groups, or a co-created and ongoing event like Burning Man. The difference between the previous section and this one is that in a congregation, everyone is deeply involved in the community, rather than having some people on the periphery and some people in a core group. That’s a meaningful distinction because it changes how people are welcomed into the community. If everyone is expected to be an active participant, they need to be integrated into an existing crew quickly and shown how to actively engage with that crew and the broader congregation.

Other questions

How much time do you want to spend on governance?

Organizational structure is both very important, and a trap. It’s possible to fall into a hole of talking about how the space will be governed and never actually get around to doing the thing that the space exists to do! It’s probably a good idea to make sure the founding group of people are on the same page about how much time they want to spend thinking about governance versus executing on the overall vision of the space.

Not thinking about structure at all is also problematic, because there will be questions of who is responsible for what, how that should be decided, and what to do when there are big disagreements. So there’s a sweet spot: you will eventually think about governance whether you want to or not, so better to do it ahead of time before you’re forced to do it fast. Just don’t lose sight of the forest (community space) for the trees (organizational structure).

I’m not going to go into different organizational structure options here, since it’s a big topic that I’m far from an expert in, but here’s an essay I’ve found useful when thinking about the power dynamics at play in any organizational structure.

How many rules is enough?

Physical spaces often have rules that look like “you’re allowed to do X here, but not Y,” often because Y is thought to be dangerous or frivolous or whatever. I think, if possible, it’s better to have rules about how to behave in the space rather than about what specific activities are or aren’t allowed, because they make people feel freer in the space while having a similar effect as more specific rules. At Highside, we had pretty much no explicit rules, but it was very clear to anyone there that being an asshole would not be tolerated, nor would disrespecting the space. We (the people running things) were extremely friendly and respectful, and others followed suit (see the second half of Belonging). If anyone failed to follow that social code, by being creepy or way too drunk or rude, we either kicked them out immediately or didn’t invite them back, depending on the severity. But that rarely happened, because it wasn’t a fun place to be an asshole…no one would engage with you if you were!

My sense is that the fewer rules you can get away with having while still keeping behavior under control, the better. Fewer rules implies a higher level of trust, and will lead to more creative risk-taking. At the same time, some guidelines are needed, for two reasons. If there are people who have good intentions but aren’t used to being in high-trust contexts and aren’t sure what sorts of behavior are acceptable, the rules help them understand how they should engage. And if there are people who are acting in bad faith, the rules make it so that they can’t easily cry foul when they are told that they need to change their behavior or leave. People will sometimes behave in ways you don’t want them to, and it’s much harder to fix that problem without any explicit behavioral guidelines.

How much can you ask of people?

I struggled a lot with feeling like I was asking too much of the people who helped run Highside. There was a lot to do, and the only people I could afford to pay were the event staff. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have worried about it – everyone was happy to feel like they were contributing, and if they felt I was asking too much of them, no one was forcing them to do it…they could just tell me.

That said, it definitely takes some time to figure out how to manage people outside of the more hierarchical, financially driven work contexts most of us are used to. For things to run smoothly, people need to do what they said they were going to do, but the usual enforcement mechanisms for that (e.g., getting fired) don’t make sense in the context of a community space, especially since people often aren’t getting paid. This is a problem I certainly don’t have the answer to, but it’s worth thinking hard about.

Now what?

This piece has covered a lot of ground, from the principles underlying community spaces to some of the high-level decisions to the nitty-gritty problems that might need solving. These lessons have mostly come from the time I spent running Highside, but I’ve also pulled from experiences I’ve had in other spaces, and from the lessons I’ve read about or heard from other community organizers.

My hope in writing all this is that it might help other people who want to create community spaces get started, or help people who are already part of community spaces think about how they might make those spaces more effective and enduring.

But after all these words, I think the most important part was right at the beginning: just start. Be the best host you can be. And call me if you want encouragement.

Good luck :)

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