by Gemma Tabet
You can find Impact Hubs anywhere: as the largest worldwide network focused on building communal, coworking spaces for entrepreneurial individuals; it’s not a surprise they are spread out across 5 continents, in over 50 countries and in more than 100 cities. Each Impact Hub is unique, founded separately by different local innovators, bringing diversity and variation to a globally rooted community with sustainability at its core. But which Hub was the original? What exactly is the story of this community?
The roots of Impact Hub can be traced to the United Kingdom (UK); specifically, London in 1988. A group of young dreamers, students from Wale’s Atlantic College led by Jonathan Robinson, were ready to test the waters, and more importantly, ready to push the boundaries. Seeking debate on environmental, political and social issues, they organized a two-day event at London’s Royal Festival Hall, able to host around 2,500 people, and invited prominent world leaders and thinkers such as several Noble Prize winners, The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick and Jon Snow, an English journalist and TV host. Even the Dalai Lama was enlisted for a video address.
It was a great success, and the group's persistence, boldness and passion were recognized by the United Nations (UN), who invited them to organize and host an NGO event for the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. But instead, the youths chose an alternative; heading to Soweto, a South African city at the center of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, where activists and the local community struggled to rebuild and recover a society surrounded by wasteland.
By the time the UN 2002 Summit took place, the student group, helping Soweto’s inhabitants, had transformed the mountains of waste into the Soweto Mountain of Hope or ‘SoMoHo’ (founded and directed by Mandla Mentoor, an anti-apartheid activist). A once abandoned tower in a dangerous, barren land became an arts and eco-cultural environmental center at the efforts of volunteer workers, an icon for local community regeneration and sustainable development; a story that reached the ears of many world leaders, among them former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who even took the time for a visit.
Returning to Europe, the youths realized that, as in Soweto, there were many in the UK who wanted to make a difference through their work. But these people faced challenges brought by their isolation, stuck at in-home offices. And so, rose their idea: what if people seeking change could have access to a shared space where they could connect and collaborate with one another?
Robinson, along with the ever-growing group, tackled this in 2005 by creating 'The Hub’ in the London Borough of Islington, the first workplace ever to be fully dedicated to social innovation. Using a student budget, the run-down 300-square-meter London loft was soon transformed with an interior design made of recycled and re-used materials, bringing changemakers together and allowing them to connect with their communities to organize events and further their projects and ideas.
Months passed and The Hub’s popularity grew. Robinson built an international network and reached out to them, eager to support their increasingly larger changemakers community. A gathering in 2007, however, did not result in member support, but consisted of a welcome surprise: other people proved to be just as motivated and interested to find out how to open their own Impact Hubs back in their home countries.
The group decided to create clearer principles of community building and space co-creation: principles designed in Soweto and tested in London, but needing refinement. By 2008, nine other Hubs joined the first on three different continents. These new spaces were highly successful, attracting people from all over that sought to build a better world.
But by 2010, tension rose from the dozen of newly-formed Hubs, which began to fight for control and openly went against the center's demands, trying to re-negotiate or refusing to pay the joining fee and revenue share, causing a cash crisis. An emergency meeting of founding teams was called in Amsterdam, and it was decided the project would have to become a collective with a bottom-up model of co-leadership and shared practices. Local Hubs would be able to own themselves as well as a part of the core organization, the Hub Association in Vienna. This association would have ownership of the brand, global IT systems, and take official decisions through a democratic system of governance, where each Hub had a single vote. Two years later, in 2013, a name was finally decided: Impact Hub.
Over the years Impact Hub would expand its global community of innovators and entrepreneurs, doubling in numbers to reach 160,000+ members. In 2019, the Impact Hub Switzerland opened with six Swiss Impact Hubs in Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich and, of course, Lugano with our very own Impact Hub Ticino (IHT).
Planted by a group of daring friends, Impact Hub has blossomed into a successful global network centered around bringing people of all backgrounds together to imagine an ideal world in a shared workplace. Impact Hub offers the tools for dreamers to create a better world, allowing them to build community projects focused on sustainability and collaboration; all to solve global pressing issues. Impact Hub has grown very far from being simply a place to work; its current model is no longer centered around space, but has changed to focus on space as an enabler of impact. Yet the story of Impact Hub is far from over. As Impact Hub Islington rightfully said, “We look forward to the future.”
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