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Emily Jaquiery starts her work day like most. She drops her child off at daycare and goes in to her office for Magnolia Insurance Group. But her office is not part of a large corporate bullpen or an isolated space in her house or office building. Instead, her office space is shared with others and is part of a larger coworking community called Gather. Here she can get cookies that are baked in-house by a local bakery, get coffee with a coworking friend or a client, host meetings and work around others.
Gather is a collaborative coworking space that started in downtown Richmond in 2014. Since then, it has grown to three locations, adding one in Scott’s Addition in 2016 and Short Pump in January.
Workspaces like Gather offer people like Jaquiery – who work for small businesses or from home – the opportunity to build a workplace community, said managing partner James Crenshaw.
“The real value is community,” Crenshaw said. “The building is not full of strangers, and you have the opportunity to build relationships that last.”
The Gather location in Short Pump has an open floor at its entrance, offering a community workspace design to promote discussion. It almost looks like a coffee shop, with tables and arm chairs scattered across the space and a coffee bar against the back wall. On Wednesdays, it could easily be confused for one during the weekly cookie hour from local Carytown bakery Sugar & Twine.
Membership options start at $215 a month, and all memberships are on a month-to-month payment basis. Members of Gather can use the collaborative space to work on their individual projects and also to interact with others and build a community that is stronger than even the type that is created in traditional workplace environments, said Crenshaw.
Each location has community managers that help create and tailor events for members, as well as create a workspace that is uniquely suited for everyone.
“It is a lot of back-end work,” said Short Pump community manager John Greenhill. “We help prep offices and make the space inviting. We also organize and host a number of social events.”
Community managers pay attention to members’ interests when planning these events, in hopes that not only will members want to participate, but bond better over those shared interests. For example, Greenhill said, a group of members at the Short Pump location will be learning Spanish together after they learned that they all had the desire to do so.
The human connection
In addition to the social aspects, Gather also promises members a professional environment. With three membership options, members have the opportunity to use the general workspace, reserved desk space or a private office. All three membership options give the same basic benefits – access to all the social and networking events, 24/7 entry to all three locations and the ability to reserve conference rooms at all three locations.
Each location also offers all members private places to make phone calls and the opportunity to brainstorm with others about ways to help their businesses grow.
There is also modern AV equipment at each location for hosting business meetings, bluetooth access to the buildings for all hours and networking sessions to meet new potential clients and brainstorm business ideas. Membership access to Slack may be used to socialize with other members in and outside of the workspace.
If members choose to go with the private office membership, they can pay for whatever size office they would like (starting at $550 a month) and from there personalize their office to their liking in a way that becomes unique to themselves and their company. Gather will help prepare the offices for them, said Crenshaw, and also will provide a professional decal of their company graphic on their office windows.
Gather officials do everything they can to fulfill the company’s mission of overcoming the modern digital divide that keeps people separated, Crenshaw said.
“People miss human-to-human interaction,” Crenshaw said. “Gather provides a space that helps facilitate that and fill in the void of interaction that came from making more and more work digital.”
That can work well for small business owners, such as Jaquiery, who are able to network with others in person and help each other build their businesses.
“It’s inspiring to be around others,” Jaquiery said. “By myself, there was a loss of collaboration. There are a lot of creative people here at Gather that I can work with who are open to things that are different.”
This appears to be a sentiment for many members of Gather.
Nick Toce of Helm & Hue, a creative print production company, started a Gather membership three years ago and hasn’t looked back. Toce’s company is able to take advantage of Gather’s collaborative style to build his business by word of mouth and by making Gather itself a client.
“We’ve grown as Gather has grown,” Toce said.
And Gather is still growing. Due to increased levels in interest and membership, the company will be expanding its downtown offices to a new location on Third and Broad streets just off the GRTC Pulse route next year.
To learn more about Gather, visit gatherrva.com or call (804) 684-8881.
