Building alliances in a rural coliving space in Spain
Since the idea of starting a rural coliving space came into my mind, I knew that building alliances with other like-minded spaces and organizations was a key factor.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I was going to do that. I thought that those things would just appear naturally. And I was right. The first alliance came up organically with the founders of Cloud Citadel when I visited them during their opening month, which was February 2020. We discussed a discount program between our spaces, but in the end we realised that a discount program doesn’t make much sense for spaces like ours — what makes sense is recommending coliving spaces that share similar interests.
Visiting other coliving spaces
With our very first alliance under our belt, I went to visit Nine Coliving just before lockdown. I met with Anne, the founder, and pitched her the alliance idea, which she agreed to immediately. At that point, I understood that building alliances fit into the spirit of sharing. Whether it’s sharing spaces such as coliving and coworking, or helping each other with this kind of initiative.
After that, when Anceu Coliving was still in the making_,_ I received a message from Africa. She is the founder of Espacio Arroelo, a coworking space in Pontevedra. She wanted to meet to see if there was any way for our two spaces to collaborate. The meeting was a success. In less than a month, we had a framework. We called it the Creative Commons Community. It is an alliance whereby colivers from Anceu Coliving are welcome to work from Espacio Arroelo and vice versa.
By September 2020 it had been almost three months since we started this alliance with Espacio Arroelo, and we’re pleased to share some of the inspiring moments in the video below. Enjoy!
If you wish to be part of our #AnceuAlliances, feel free to reach out to us at hello@anceu.com. Let’s collaborate and build an alliance!
Arroelo and Anceu: building collaborations with the #arroeloverfamily
See also: Creating urban alliances