Hello! Happy Thanksgiving! I wanted to take a moment and introduce myself. My name is Wendy Clark and I have lived in the inner city of Durham, NC since 2000. I am a pre-catalyst. When I was 20, I started my own service based business with less than $100 (www.carpediemcleaning.com ). I decided the goal of my life would be to help as many under-resourced people I could, particularly children. The business grew, had some experiences along the way, then 2 years ago continued to pursue the question of how you bring change to a community from the inside-out. I decided the next step would be find space for my current office and came across an old warehouse that would be perfect for creating a center to create a community atmosphere in addition to provide access for affordable office space and an entrepreneurial culture with my business being an anchor. It’s 14, 500 square feet and will be ready Spring 2009. (www.belovedcommunitync.com) I just heard about co-working one week ago and your google group yesterday (Thanks Brian!).
I have two passions. First- Social entrepreneurship. I believe it’s important to have the heart for justice and helping people but to operate with business sense. It allows for both models of the for- profit and non-profit but is based on the people and their goals to help people. Second- To create a bridge between the gentrification culture and the local community. There are a lot of creative and amazing people within the local community who have not had access to relational and mind-set opportunities to help cultivate their dreams. Could we bridge the two demographics and see amazing things? Here are my questions- As I have been looking through the materials I see that most of these centers are for the technological/consultant savvy, 20-30-something demographics. Has anyone had experience with creating a niche to a more social entrepreneurial focus? Two- has anyone had experience with cultural crossovers to create a more diverse space? Also a mentor that I am working with is very concerned about people’s ability to pay especially those that are coming from a more of a survival background and are growing in their entrepreneurial mind-sets. Do you have a qualification process for people coming into the community? Thank you for creating this forum and already being a great resource! Wendy --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
