Putting Like-Minded Nonprofits Under One Roof

How can nonprofits increase their efficacy and collaboration through community-minded office space?

In the early days of Seawall, we heard from many of our partners, whether teachers or committed nonprofit professionals, that one of the biggest things holding them back from doing city-changing work was how isolated they were from each other. They told us how even though many of them were working together to help underpin the success of the city school system, they were often in 30 different office buildings, paying rent to 30 different landlords, and ultimately, missing out on opportunities for connection and collaboration. That didn’t sound like the most productive way for nonprofits to serve the students and citizens of our cities.  The vision our partners had was of a community of nonprofits that could make a single building their home base, enriching each other and the communities they work with because proximity fuels collaboration, innovation, and support. First at Miller’s Court in 2009, then at Union Mill in 2011 and Oxford Mills in 2012, we ensured that the 30,000-40,000 square feet of office space at each looked more like an active community of nonprofits than a collection of individual office users. Our nonprofit partners told us that finding regular meeting and conference space was both a headache and unwanted expense – so we included 5,000 square feet of shared meeting room space in each building, free and reservable to any nonprofit in our community. We helped them complete turnkey build-outs so their spaces met their budgets and their needs, and we included coffee shops like Charmington’s,  Artifact Coffee, and Gryphon Coffee in the buildings for meetings or just a place to unwind. We’ve now served more than 40 nonprofit office partners at our buildings, and we love watching how their collaboration and passion fuels transformation both inside and outside the shared walls.