The fearless CX members who did the final office move out in November 2021
Civic Exchange has closed the doors to our office at 233 N Michigan Ave in Chicago.
Why? The pandemic. As each of Civic Exchange’s 8 member companies navigated pivots large and small to adjust to the ongoing reality of COVID-19, it became harder to justify paying for downtown office space that no one could safely use.
Over the course of 2020 and 2021, as more Civic Exchange member organizations decided to transition permanently to fully remote, the economics of sharing an office stopped making sense. So, when the time came for our lease to expire in November 2021, we moved out.
What’s next?
With the closing of our office at 233 N Michigan, we’ll be spinning down the Civic Exchange brand and LLC. We will continue to participate in the We Will Chicago Citywide plan and continue our work on the City that Works for All re-imagining events with a series on harm reduction and creation of care in Journalism coming soon.
Our community will continue to exist, both virtually and in a new space. Three Civic Exchange companies, The Center for Tech and Civic Life, Block Club Chicago and Chalkbeat Chicago have found a new shared office a few blocks away on Wacker Drive.
Thank you
While this is the end of the Civic Exchange office, it is not goodbye. What started as a wild idea that Jenn and Derek cooked up to find our next downtown office that could serve more than just “a place to work” has turned into a wonderful community, and collaborations that led to friendships that will last a lifetime.
Let the record show that Civic Exchange was a success! We built something special together and when the world changed, we adapted and changed with it. All 8 of our organizations not only survived the pandemic, but have grown and expanded since we banded together 3 years ago.
So raise a glass to Civic Exchange! Thank you all for being a part of it.
Thank you to all of the organizations who collectively created our community: Block Club Chicago, Center for Tech & Civic Life, Chalkbeat, CHANGE IL, DataMade, Democracy Works, Hearken & mRelief. Your leadership & staff are what made this space special!
And special thanks to the folks outside of our member companies who supported Civic Exchange in more ways than we can name: Rainey McGinnis, Scarlett Reynolds, Elise Zelechowski, Dan Lurie, Larry Serota & the entire Transwestern team, Kyla Williams, LaTanya Lane, Sholeh Munion, Mara Zepeda, John Neumann, Yvonne Afable, Andres Torres, and Daniel Ash.
What Jenn and Derek learned
As the two co-founders of Civic Exchange, we learned quite a few things about running a coworking office. Here are a few bits of wisdom from us:
Getting and leaving the office space
Navigating the commercial real-estate world is hard. We recommend getting a good real estate broker. Larry Serota from Transwestern performed several miracles for us in securing and negotiating our office lease. If you’re in Chicago and looking for an office space, give Larry a call!
Office furniture is expensive. We were very fortunate at Civic Exchange to have subleased our space from another company that had expense tastes. Because of this, we inherited a lot of great furniture. The extra furniture we did need, including additional desks and chairs, ended up being a lot more expensive than we anticipated ($6,000 to buy, move and install 16 additional desks). So, you know, plan for that.
Moving in and out of an office is expensive. There are real costs to moving in and out of a downtown office building. In both cases we had to hire movers which the building had stringent requirements around. This meant paying a lot of money for these one-time services. For reference, it cost us about $10,000 to decommission and move out of our space.
Operations
Budgeting and hiring an office manager would have been a great idea. Looking back on our time at Civic Exchange, while it was great fun and very rewarding, Derek and Jenn realized that it ended up taking a lot more of our time than we would have liked. We both had our own companies to run, and there were always little challenges and distractions that pulled us in. From troubleshooting the office internet, to moving furniture around, to contacting the building for maintenance issues — it all fell on the two of us. In retrospect, we should have budgeted for and hired an office manager to take on day-to-day operations.
Forming an LLC to sign the lease ended up being fine. Our original plan for Civic Exchange was to find a large non-profit to sign the lease for us. When these plans fell through, Jenn and Derek formed Civic House, LLC, which ended up signing the lease. Despite some initial concerns, this ended up being a fine solution.
Being transparent on rent and expenses helped avoid difficult conversations. Rent can be a touchy subject. To help make it fair and transparent, we opened our financial books to all Civic Exchange members and were up-front about our own expenses and what we needed to collect in member rent to make our space viable. It also helped that we didn’t get into this to profit or get rich!
Community building
The biggest value to members was the physical space. As the pandemic wore on, this became clearer and clearer to us. While community building, mission alignment, shared resources, strategic partnerships, and social activities were all great perks of Civic Exchange, in the end, it was the nice, affordable office space in downtown Chicago that brought everyone together. Take that away, and it's hard to bind a community like this together.
Each organization was able to participate at different levels. Plan for that. We had initially structured Civic Exchange to be run with each organization participating in group decision-making, events, and activities. While we were successful in building a group decision-making process, some organizations were unable to participate beyond that due to their own company/nonprofit obligations. We could have set more realistic expectations around this and had more frequent “real talk” about what each group could feasibly contribute. Looking back, this was probably a pretty common pattern that happens when a group of people voluntarily collaborate.
Creating a regular space for founders to share and vent was a surprisingly good idea. One of our best ideas was to hold monthly Founders Exchange events for founders to talk shop, exchange best practices and have a supportive peer community to vent. Through these conversations, we were able to share common challenges in hiring, reviews, remote work, management and sales that helped us all run our organizations better. We also referred good accountants, lawyers, HR tools, and management training to each other, which was invaluable. We created a regular survey to solicit ideas and topics for what folks wanted to cover, so our “programming” for these events was always relevant and timely. We’d love to see more of these lightly structured, high-trust peer groups!
Sharing resources helped keep costs down. Beyond the savings our companies enjoyed on rent by pooling our budgets together, we also helped one another by sharing equipment — including high quality printers, giant whiteboards on rolling wheels, projectors, extra monitors and other everyday office supplies. We could always pop down the hallway to borrow our version of a cup of sugar from our CX neighbor companies.
Creating shared responsibilities was key to fairness of upkeep! Left unchecked, any shared space will start to get messy, leaving the most fastidious people with the most responsibility to clean up after others. To keep this work equitably distributed, we had a rotating schedule for which company was in charge of a 2x monthly fridge clean, and had conventions for how to label your items, which helped keep the dishes and passive aggressive sticky notes from ever piling up in the kitchen.
Eating lunch together is key to happiness. And happy hours. Thanks to the more extraverted members of Civic Exchange (looking at you Josh and Summer!) member company staff regularly had the chance to break bread and share an end of week drink together. This not only helped us see ways in which we as individuals could help each other out, but how our companies could work together to better support our communities. Plus, we had a lot of fun.
Serendipitous connections really did happen! Many coworking spaces promise this, and in our experience, it actually did happen. Cross-organization partnerships were formed and joint grant proposals were written and funded. We partnered on producing content, events, and new possibilities. It really did seem to work best because we were aligned on a shared mission and set of values and took the time to learn about what each company was up to.
Questions?
Thinking about starting your own coworking space? That’s great! 2022 is actually a great time to do that - commercial rents are low and a lot of people who have been working from home are looking for a community space to join. Jenn and Derek are likely not going to get back into the coworking business, but we’d be happy to advise and support you if you do!
Email us at info@civicexchangechicago.com
