Cowork Crew: Bringing the self-employed together at Vulcan Works
Local business owners Penni and Jo Pickering tell us why they started up Cowork Crew - a new event for freelancers, small business owners, and anyone who runs their own thing.
The idea is to get everyone out of the home office/coffee shop/kitchen table and into a room full of people who share the same challenges.
The event runs from 9am to 5pm once a month.
Held in a purpose-built coworking room in Vulcan Works in Northampton, each Cowork Crew day will feature time to chat, meet others, get some work done, learn from a speaker and there’s an afternoon cake break.
We had the idea as we missed the real-life community we’d found pre-Covid.
In that time much of it moved online, and we wanted the real-life and local elements of meeting up with other self employed people who knew what it felt like to ‘wear all the hats’.
There’s this magic that happens when the self-employed get together. Through events like this in the past we met others to team up with on client projects, suppliers we use through to today, and friends who we can chat shop with to help us feel less isolated.
According to IPSE there are 4.2 million solo self-employed in the UK, with 25% of those having started up since 2020.
Of those surveyed 24% reported feeling lonely or isolated.
That’s why we’re doing this. Having a community around us is the number one thing that’s helped us to keep running our design studio over the last 7 years. Finding other people who get what it’s like to ride the rollercoaster of freelance life.
We spent 2019 travelling across South East Asia.
In that time we worked from different coworking spaces all with their own take on what ‘coworking’ is, and lived in a co-work co-live space in Cambodia.
We intend to take everything we’ve learned from that experience, and from running The Marketing Meetup in Northampton, to create a welcoming monthly event for the self-employed in the heart of Northampton.
The intention of Cowork Crew is to help everyone do better because they have each other. Knowing your local community of freelancers and micro businesses means you’ve got support. Whether that’s someone to team up with on a project, to commiserate with when things get tough, or just someone to meet up with for a coffee.
Cowork Crew kicks off with event one on Thursday 16th May.
For event one, Tom Garfield, co-founder of Brand New Notebook, will be speaking about Selling with Integrity: How to make more sales and keep your soul.