CoHabitat is expanding to Shreveport $160K in funding

The following post is a cross-post of a press release that went out to media on Thursday last week (I’m a bit behind).  I’ll have plenty to say about his in coming weeks and news to report as pre-party, launch date, etc.

I’m looking forward to connecting with our friends in south Louisiana (LaunchPad NOLA) on co-working and community organizing.  Several of us from CoHabitat Dallas will be traveling to New Orleans for the sure-to-be-awesome TribeCon.

SHREVEPORT-BOSSIER, LA

Co-working is an emerging trend that allows often-isolated workers, such as work-at-home professionals, independent contractors, and budding entrepreneurs to enjoy a supportive community setting while still working independently. Coworking in this type of social environment allows these independent workers to share values. It also allows them to fuel their interest in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space.

Now CoHabitat Louisiana partners Blake Burris and John Grindley and the DDA (Shrevepor’s Downtown Development Authority) are bringing that synergy to the Shreveport-Bossier (Gmap) area.

CoHabitat Louisiana (Facebook Page) is a new co-working space with a cafe-like atmosphere that is designed to create and foster a micro-enterprise atmosphere within a targeted geographical market area of North Louisiana. CoHabitat Louisiana will benefit the greater Shreveport–Bossier area in a number of ways, utilizing a currently unoccupied building, encouraging an Earth-friendly work environment, and bringing creative, entrepreneurial-thinking individuals out of home offices and into downtown.

Co-working projects have been enjoying great success around the world including similar projects in Dallas (CoHabitat Dallas) co-founded by Burris and New Orleans (Launchpad NOLA) founded by Chris Schultz.

“I think the timing is right for co-working in Louisiana; clustering of entrepreneurs and freelancers in a strong community environment accelerates their success.  Launch Pad NOLA looks forward to collaborating with CoHabitat to create a true network of entrepreneurs across the state of Louisiana.” Chris Schultz, owner of Launch Pad NOLA in New Orleans, LA.

“Co-working spaces tend to adapt to the local market and this has certainly been true in Dallas.  A  majority of our membership are building consumer web applications that tend to include Facebook and iPhone functionality.  I am very excited to partner with the DDA and John Grindley to extend the CoHabitat brand from Dallas to my hometown area.” Blake Burris, co-founder of CoHabitat Lousiana and CoHabitat Dallas.

It is also a project that the City of Shreveport’s Mayor Cedric Glover believes will bring a new high tech and entrepreneural spirit to our area and to downtown.

“I am proud of the hard work that John Grindley and the Coworking team have done to bring this project very close to fruition here in Shreveport.  This is the type of creative thinking that Shreveport needs to begin to create an innovation economy and revitalize downtown.” Cedric B. Glover, Mayor of Shreveport.

Interest in the project has increased rapidly over the last several months and those wanting to be involved in CoHabitat Louisiana are encouraged to fill out an online co-working survey to help build the environment conducive to North Louisiana’s needs.

That interest has further been increased by the support of The Downtown Development Authority of Shreveport. DDA facilitates initiatives that aid private and public development within the Downtown District of Shreveport, LA. CoHabitat Louisiana exemplifies that development and the DDA’s mission.

“The nature of work in our culture is changing rapidly, as more and more of the workforce, especially younger workers, are wanting to be independent of corporate structures, long commutes, and traditional definitions of the work day. Coworking presents an attractive alternative to independent contractors and work-at-home professionals, and has the potential to grow quickly into a major element of the workplace. At the Shreveport Downtown Development Authority, we believe strongly in this concept and its potential to help position our downtown as a viable and attractive location for coworking. That’s why we have committed to a major investment in CoHabitat Louisiana. We encourage other groups who are active in the economic development field to make CoHabitat Louisiana a priority in their efforts to expand and stabilize the job base.” Don Shea, Executive Director of the Downtown Development Authority of Shreveport.

The project still needs additional funding to begin operations downtown under Grindley and Burris’ three-year business forecast. The partners are actively seeking support from private individuals and other organizations in the community.

For more information please contact: CoHabitat Louisiana Managing Partner, John Grindley @ 318-230-0157 or email: johnmgrindley@gmail.com

Just a reminder, Shreveport-Bossier locals interested in co-working, please take the survey.

For upates, join the Facebook Page.

A brief history of CoHabitat and Dallas coworking

My interest in “coworking” was piqued by a presentation Chris Messina and Raven Zachary gave in Dallas at the first local Barcamp (January 2006.)  It sounded sorta’ dreamy:  a place, a community, a petri dish for people and ideas to flourish in a way  they don’t when you’re working from home, a café, or a low-rise office with drop ceilings.  I was familiar with incubators like StarTech in Richardson and various executive suites, but this was different.

Surely, many of us in attendance at that presentation thought: Dallas must have this coworking!  In subsequent weeks, quite a few people added their names to the coworking wiki expressing their interest.  Dallas is a big city, and naturally people live all over the place; which became challenge number one: agreeing on a central location. Challenge number two, and more important to me, was finding the right kind of area.  Coworking spaces that I’ve seen do well are typically located in an urban area with easy (read: walkable) access to cafés, pubs, and local eateries.  The buildings housing successful coworking spaces also tend to have some character, i.e., they’re not sterile office buildings like the corporate prisons where many of us have worked at one time on another.  (Hats off to the younger ones among us who are skipping the ‘working for the man’ phase and bravely jumping straight into entrepreneurial pursuits!)

To jump ahead (about 2 yrs 9 mths!), in mid-October a buddy, Dave Copps, called to say that he was considering a new office space for his company, PureDiscovery, and asked if I knew anyone else needing space…hrmm. My first question was “WHERE?”  because not just any place was going to work for what I had in mind   Luckily Dave’s response was “well, a friend is considering buying a 100-year-old house in Uptown”  - BINGO!  :D

The Home of CoHabitat Coworking

My mind was off to the races; considering the possibilities as I explained the tenets of coworking and rattled off some examples like Conjunctured (Austin), IndyHall (Philly), CitizenSpace (SF) and CarolineCollective (Houston.)  Dave saw the potential and shared some information with the real estate guys.  After the first property under consideration (right off the Katy Trail)  we had toured with few a dozen friends fell through,  we quickly settled on another, equally-old and quirky house, on the opposite end of Routh St. in the State-Thomas area.

Knowing we needed our entrepreneurial friends and the larger local community to rally behind the idea, we quickly settled on a name, “CoHabitat,” to represent the vision going forward.  I setup the requisite twitter account and Facebook page and starting spreading the word with folks who I expected would support the idea.

In my next post about CoHabitat, I’ll write about what’s happened in the last 5 weeks or so since we starting moving in on top of the previous owners and tenants

A special thanks goes out to those who were first to support CoHabitat and have given their time and support to move things forward (not to mention moving furniture): Christopher St. John, Stormy Shippy, Andy Chen, Andres Fabris, Nikhil Nilakantan, Jacob Morse (logo), Adam Strickland, Steven Ray (website), Marvin Molina and Joseph Manes (Ikea assembly).

Follow us on twitter for regular updates and check out our Facebook Page too. I’ll update this post when the website is up.