Cowork Club brings creative freelancers together to tackle work isolation

Cowork Club is about connecting self-employed microbusiness owners once a month in a one-day event that combines networking and coworking.

Organisers Penni and Jo Pickering want to create a community of freelancers who can use the event to meet new people, solve challenges and share ideas.

Penni, who is a web developer, said: “Cowork Club is about the magic that happens when you bring freelancers and microbusiness owners together and we’ve started it because it’s something that we’d like to go to ourselves.

“We hope it will help with the isolation that comes with home working. Getting similar people in the same space at the same time gives us all an opportunity to meet a likeminded community of people who do similar jobs to us.”

Married couple Penni and Jo, who are both University of Northampton alumni, run a website design studio Kabo Creative from their Northamptonshire home. They gained inspiration for Cowork Club after running their business while travelling South East Asia.

Jo said: “We went to all these coworking spaces in Bali and Cambodia. The entrepreneur and freelance lifestyle out there is so inspirational. Many a day we would spend in a bamboo building with super-fast wifi on the edge of a monkey forest.

“While we travelled, we met clients, friends, and people with similar business challenges to us and by chatting together we helped each other solve those challenges.”

When they returned to Northamptonshire last year, Vulcan Works had just opened, and the pair began delivering the local branch of The Marketing Meetup bimonthly networking events at the town centre workspace, which also offers office rental, meeting rooms and business support services.

It is at Vulcan Works that their Cowork Club brainchild began. Both initiatives are sponsored by Digital Northants.

“Vulcan Works is a great opportunity for a business as small as ours to join the local community and have the opportunity to spend time with other creative businesses,” said Penni.

“A business of our size doesn’t need a permanent space, but Vulcan Works has made real difference to us. We’ve met so many people by just going there every so often.

“Cowork Club provides a guaranteed day where people will all come in at the same time and get that time together. We hope that it will soon be the answer for solo workers across the country as we aim to spread to other hub cities in the UK.”

Vulcan Works centre manager Garrick Hurter said: “Cowork Club is a fantastic idea and I hope that it will introduce many more microbusinesses to our wonderful workspace.

“Digital Northants has built up a tightknit group of people in a similar field and this is a brilliant extension of that. Now freelancers can work together collaboratively at the event or just side-by-side if they want some company.

“Vulcan Works was designed to be more than just an office space. We have the same vision as Penni and Jo, to build a community of likeminded people. Cowork Club fits in brilliantly with that vision and purpose.”

Each Cowork Club meet up will feature a speaker with a topic relevant to microbusiness owners, such as accounting and proposals.

The first event takes place on Thursday 16th May from 9am to 5pm and features speaker Tom Garfield talking about how to get really good at sales without selling your soul.

Tickets, which are limited by desk space, cost £25 +VAT per person.