What is the answer for Downtown Las Vegas?
The Winning Formula in DTLV.
I was pretty involved at the inception of the "Downtown Project" - very much on the "community side"
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com walked into Emergency Arts and was touring around.
At that time, Todd and I were the only people on the 2nd floor in the Bloomworlds office.
He invited us to his house for a discussion about Downtown. At that meeting, we were the only 2 non-Zappos employees. His team would be discussing what could be done as they prepared to move Downtown and take over the "old city hall building."
So many things were discussed as possibilities in that meeting.
The idea of a "maker space" came up.
"Start-up weekend" was thrown around and I jumped on that opportunity. That meeting is where the team for that first start-up weekend was formed. I was then part of a group of community members that split from the employees. The community members were very excited about "Return on Community." The group called ourselves SHIFT, because we wanted to shift the perception of Las Vegas. It was made up of community members who were both lively and interested. It was led by a DTP hire, a Harvard graduated expert whose whole profession is understanding how architecture can help achieve community: Jennifer Magnolfi.
Recently, she was featured in the Harvard Business Review discussing her work in the land of coworking & creation of community. You should talk 15 minutes and read that article titled "Workspaces that move people" HERE. I will make you excited for the future of work.
This new science of communication, this psychology of work made me giddy. I was immediately happy to be closer to a work-style that suited me:
- creative
- flexible
- community focused
- mindful
- exciting
- limitless
- lucky
Her job for DTP was to understand what the community wanted and help them to accomplish this. Made up of all locals, we executed what we called a "Community Mindshare" meeting with 125 community members. Together, by interest, the group split up at the meeting to brainstorm ideas. We had the following community verticals that showed active engagement:
Performance/ improv
video / content production
health and wellness
fashion (emergent)
makers (This has become a funded space by VegasTechFund: SynShop)
game development
Check out the 10min video of the meeting for a more in-depth understand of what projects the community came up with HERE
DTP then picked a space and asked the community what they wanted in that space and brought in experts to help us codesign the space: see HERE. They also brought in coworking leaders from across the country who gave us the formula to create community - a proven method on how we could do this ourselves, step by step. This is where and how The Reset Project was born. This is also where "Build a Greener Block" was developed.
The community came up with recommendations.
Those recommendations were this: *See the attached power point presentation
Community as a product- CoWorking 'app'
- Coworking spaces: Invest in smart work spaces with start-up resources, wifi, subsidized rent and mentorships focused on cultivating partnerships.
- Create a fund whereby projects (business + community) could obtain seed funding, matching funds, etc. Almost like a Kickstarter for micro-grants that are community based. See example HERE.
The unfortunate follow-up to this story is that from the categories at the mindshare, only 2 projects survived: The Maker Space (Syn Shop) and The Reset Project- still a labor of love for those working on it and never supported financially by DTP. They used the space labeled as "community space" for 9th Bridge school instead. The community never got their space. DTP did not fulfill any of these recommendations because they were not "profit producing." Most of the 150 community members (and most all in the video) have left, shut down businesses or been disenfranchised. Some of those people became DTPs biggest critics.
I share this with you because I would hate for us to make the same mistake that we have made before- recruitment, not retention. We need to keep the small businesses here and invested.
Perhaps there is a discussion here. We could revisit this initiative. It was 100% local driven and would create a ROC for all of us who were recruited (and will continue to be recruited) to work in DTLV. I don't think a "coworking app" is necessarily the answer, but community, approached in this way has multiplier effects for all of us.
