Shoreditch Works, a coworking space for startups in Tech City, has been running a Kickstarter campaign to open the ‘Shoreditch Village Hall’. The original goal of £25,000 was intended to turn the ground floor and basement of a disused 1950s warehouse on Shoreditch High St into a hub for the community. This project, the first of its kind, has been hugely successful on Kickstarter with companies such as IBM, Facebook, BasePS, the Open Data Institute, Twilio and VMWare getting involved.
The space will include a 200 person event space in the basement with 20% of events held there free to groups who can’t afford to pay like hack days, after school coding, meetups and more. With so much support from the community, they smashed through the £25,000 goal within 21 days. They then created the stretch goal of £50,000, with that money four full time desk memberships would be given away for free for a year to a needy startup voted in by the Kickstarter backers. That goal was reached in less than a week. Next, a £75,000 stretch goal. With the additional funds raised, the team could put together a Community Management Apprenticeship with Hackney UTC (University Technical College). This goal was smashed within a day, and the campaign went on to raise £90,000.
Girish Patangay – engineer at Facebook said “We started our engineering office in London a little over 8 months ago and have grown a lot. We want to get better at being involved in the tech community and this seemed like a perfect opportunity to do that.” While Ben Nunney of Twilio, tweeted “Just in awe of the Shoreditch Works project to open the Shoreditch Village Hall for the local community.”
This building has been empty for almost two years. The transformation is going to be incredible and the individuals and companies who have been involved from the beginning are going to be a massive part of making it a success.
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