October is National Women’s Small Business Month in the U.S. and we are celebrating the beginning of the month having hit a couple of milestones we are thrilled about, while also planning for a big announcement at the end of this month and our retreat and meetup in Toronto! Whew! what a fun month this will be.
This week the number of women-owned coworking spaces on our global map climbed to over 100!
This is thrilling because we continue to shine the spotlight of the world’s interest in coworking onto the women who are continuing to make this movement be about community in the truest sense of the word.
While coworking is a female-led movement, as this article from DeskMag illustrates, women are receiving less compensation and funding support than our male counterparts. Therefore, this question arises,
“Who is actually working for coworking spaces? Predominantly women, however, they generally earn less income than men. Even female founders and owners earn less and are more likely to rate their income negatively. They more often operate smaller coworking spaces.”
DeskMag, Operators & Staff Members: The People Behind Coworking Spaces
We are also celebrating the fact that as of this week, 10 women have bought monthly memberships from us.
That’s $150 in monthly revenue which allows us to pay for our Mailchimp account, our email and website domains and our banking fees. Every month we inch closer to being able to pay for all of our monthly expenses and each increase in revenue allows us to focus more energy on supporting the small businesses women are opening within the coworking movement. The faith each of these women puts in us as fellow small business owners means the world to us as we continue to drive our goal of creating a business that is sustainable and supports us and our families while continuing to increase in value and support for the coworking movement as a whole.
Women Who Cowork is women owned and Laura and Iris are passionate about promoting and supporting women-owned businesses. The work we are doing in elevating the women who have built and continue to lead this movement is very important and our leadership is very much needed now while coworking continues to find it’s true North, especially in the aftermath of the failed WeWork IPO which Amy Nelson so astutely pointed out would have been much less likely to have happened with a woman led company.
As an organization, Women Who Cowork has already empowered more women in business. Together, we have all increased the number of women-owned small businesses across the globe by +100! And each of those spaces is supporting entrepreneurship in their communities.
In fact every woman who runs a coworking space supports the entrepreneurs in her community who are each, in turn, supporting their greater community.
We call this the Women Who Cowork Ripple Effect.
When you support Women Who Cowork, you support two women running a small business who are in turn supporting 800+ women running their small businesses and each of those women is supporting the members within their communities.
As we further our efforts to support the women of the movement we have been actively building a funding campaign to raise our first official round. True to our collaborative nature and values driven culture, we have chosen to crowdfund through iFundWomen, as their proprietary platform offering is aligned with our mission in supporting female owned and operated businesses. We are congruently building a partnership with iFundWomen so that our members can receive the exact kind of support they need while funding their coworking businesses.
The fundraising campaign we are building has required countless hours to prepare and the success of it will determine our ability to build the partnership with iFW. We know we can count on the coworking community to support our valuable work, and indeed we are excited to offer the opportunity to be a supporter, at the ground level, of this amazing organization we are building.
We invite you to join us in spreading the word and raising awareness this month by:
- Add your Coworking Business to our map (click Join Now)
- Use our campaign hashtag #coworkwomenowned in your social media posts
- Download our campaign image to share on social media and include a call to action to visit a woman-owned coworking space this month in honor of #NWSBM
Your support is greatly appreciated!