Episode Summary

“We are in a space now where we can get really imaginative about how we utilise resources and how we change the way we’re looking at money.”

Tilley Harris spent a decade documenting what doesn’t show up in spreadsheets.

As co-founder of AKOU, she’s obsessed with social capital—the invisible currencies exchanged every day in coworking spaces that somehow never make it into impact reports or funding decisions.

Trust. Connection. Knowledge sharing. Emotional support.

The kind of value that keeps communities alive but doesn’t fit neatly into quarterly returns.

This conversation starts where most coworking discussions end: at the uncomfortable truth that local authorities can’t see what’s actually happening in community spaces.

Redbridge has the highest number of microbusinesses of any London borough, yet it still can’t determine if coworking matters.

Meanwhile, Lewisham’s using spaces like Faceworks to support refugees arriving with nothing, building economic pathways through community connections.

Bernie and Tilley delve into ecosystem winning—a concept that sounds corporate but holds a radically different meaning. It’s about collective access to opportunity rather than individual survival. It’s the opposite of monoculture, requiring the messy complexity of diverse voices and contributions that don’t all look the same.

The tension here is real: coworking operators are building thriving ecosystems in their neighbourhoods whilst simultaneously struggling to articulate their value to the people holding budgets.

They’re creating social capital daily—through introduced freelancers who end up collaborating, through emotional support during burnout, and through knowledge exchanges that occur over coffee—but there’s no agreed-upon system for measuring or documenting these invisible currencies.

Tilley brings a photographer’s eye to data, looking for the stories playing out beneath the surface. Before you can change how resources flow, you need a year of self-care and stress-shedding to get people’s nervous systems calm enough to imagine differently. That’s what she’s learned working with Lambeth micro-service providers through the Walcott Foundation.

This episode is for coworking operators who know they’re making an impact but can’t quite explain it in ways that get them in the room where decisions happen. It’s for community builders exhausted from feeling like they’re the only ones grinding away in their neighbourhood.

And it’s for anyone wondering why coworking spaces matter more than ever, whilst simultaneously being completely overlooked by local government.

You’ll leave with language to describe the value you create, a connection to others building similar ecosystems, and a clearer picture of what’s possible when we stop trying to fit community impact into financial frameworks that were never designed to capture it.

Timeline Highlights

* [00:04] Bernie’s opening: hundreds of people starting projects in every neighbourhood, and how coworking spaces are replacing community centres

* [01:38] Tilley defines AKOU’s mission: “obsessed with social capital and networks, showing people the magic that social capital can create”

* [02:53] Ecosystem winning explained: “working as a collective to access more opportunities together”

* [04:55] Bernie names the tension: “What’s the difference between a winning ecosystem and a clique?”

* [06:27] Tilley on diversity: “For a thriving ecosystem, you need diversity. Monoculture forests are part of the climate change issues”

* [09:24] The invisible currencies revelation: social capital, creative capital, emotional support, data—all exchanged but never documented

* [12:49] Why now matters: “We’re at a really exciting time... on the brink of our completely new industrial revolution with AI”

* [15:38] Bernie on the intangible magic of real-life connection: stretching imaginations about what coworking can do

* [19:13] The golden share concept: giving the environment a seat at the board table

* [22:54] Tilley’s Walcott Foundation project: 12 months of self-care funding before service providers could even think about resource allocation

* [28:19] The recognition gap: “Is there enough celebration of what coworking spaces achieve despite the struggle?”

* [30:34] Bernie’s example: Redbridge has the highest number of microbusinesses in London, but still can’t see why coworking matters

* [31:59] Real impact examples: Faceworks supporting refugees, Urban MBA’s two-year relationship-building with the local community

* [33:34] The invitation: London Coworking Assembly bringing 150 community builders together for deep conversation

The Value That Doesn’t Show Up in Reports

Every coworking space operator knows this feeling: you’re changing lives daily, but when you try to explain your impact to a council officer or potential funder, the language falls apart.

Tilley Harris has been chasing this problem for ten years. What started as photojournalism—capturing invisible stories—evolved into data work when she realised photographs only take you so far in conversations about resource allocation.

The people making decisions about where money flows can’t see social capital, so they don’t fund it. They can’t measure trust exchanges, so they don’t value them.

The irony is brutal: coworking spaces are some of the most capital-rich environments in their neighbourhoods, just not in the currency that counts on spreadsheets. A freelancer gets introduced to a potential collaborator. Someone going through burnout finds emotional support over coffee.

A new arrival in the country accesses a network that leads to their first UK client. These exchanges occur dozens of times daily in spaces such as Urban MBA, Faceworks, and Space4.

But try putting that in a funding application. Try explaining to Redbridge Council, which has one of the highest concentrations of microbusinesses in London, that coworking infrastructure might be a worthwhile investment.

Bernie’s watched consultants submit multiple reports making this case. The response remains: maybe, we’ll think about it. Is this really necessary?

Meanwhile, Waltham Forest, Islington, and Lewisham have worked it out. They’ve connected the dots between supporting local coworking spaces and keeping revenue in the borough whilst building community resilience.

They’ve realised that when you create infrastructure for freelancers and microbusinesses to connect, you’re not just providing desks—you’re building economic pathways and social safety nets that weren’t there before.

Ecosystem Winning vs Problem Solving

Tilley introduces a concept that sounds corporate but means something radically different in practice: ecosystem winning.

The social sector defaults to problem-solving. Understandable—there are genuine problems that need to be solved. But when you’re constantly in problem-solving mode, you only see problems. You lose the ability to spot possibilities and opportunities. You lose the sense that you have choices.

Ecosystem winning invites a different question: how do we win more together rather than each struggling individually to overcome obstacles?

Bernie immediately spots the danger: “What’s the difference between a winning ecosystem and a clique?” It’s a crucial distinction.

London’s full of coworking spaces that opened in slightly rough neighbourhoods, attracting friendly people from nice areas who liked the cheap desks, and created thriving communities that somehow never included anyone from the actual neighbourhood in which they’re located.

Tilley’s answer comes from ecology: thriving ecosystems require diversity. Monoculture forests contribute to climate change. Real resilience comes from complexity and messiness, from different types of contributions that don’t all look the same.

This means changing what we value. Financial capital has dominated for so long that we’ve forgotten how to recognise other forms of wealth. What if we acknowledged creative capital—knowledge and skill exchanges happening without a price tag? What if emotional support were considered a form of currency?

What if data exchanges, or the trust built through consistent showing up, were recognised as valuable contributions to the ecosystem?

These aren’t abstract concepts. They’re happening in every coworking space, every day. The challenge is making them visible to people who only know how to measure what fits in balance sheets.

The Twelve-Month Stress Shed Before Strategy

Tilley’s work with the Walcott Foundation reveals something most impact programmes miss: you can’t strategise your way out of burnout.

The Foundation aimed to enhance its grant distribution process to microservice providers in Lambeth. The objective was to fund activities that genuinely make a difference rather than those that merely look impressive in reports.

Sensible objective. But when they started talking to the service providers, they discovered something else needed to happen first.

These organisations were struggling. Stress, burnout, and defence mechanisms had accumulated from years of under-resourcing and over-asking. They couldn’t think creatively about resource allocation because their nervous systems were stuck in survival mode.

So Tilley’s team did something unusual: they spent twelve months just providing small pots of money for self-care. For teams. For individuals. No strings attached, no strategic planning required. Just: shed the stress, tend to yourselves, remember what it feels like to not be in crisis mode.

Only after those twelve months could they begin year two—the actual work of rethinking how money flows, who makes decisions, and how it could be made easier for under-resourced services to access what they need.

This has direct implications for coworking operators. You can’t build thriving ecosystems from a place of constant scarcity and hustle.

You can’t create space for diverse voices when you’re in survival mode yourself. Self-care isn’t a luxury to address after you’ve sorted the business model—it’s the foundation that makes genuine ecosystem building possible.

Why Local Authorities Can’t See You

Bernie’s been on both sides of this conversation. He’s submitted consultancy reports to councils. He’s connected operators with local authority contacts. He’s watched brilliant coworking spaces transform their neighbourhoods whilst the council remains completely oblivious.

The gap isn’t malicious—it’s structural. Local authorities have lost so many community hubs over the past decade.

Neighbourhood centres, youth centres, and gathering spaces that once anchored communities. What they haven’t grasped yet is that coworking spaces are filling some of that gap, just in a form they don’t recognise.

Felicia’s research at the University of Bath, the ongoing conversation Stacey initiated in the LinkedIn coworking group, and the work happening at the Islington Affordable Workplace Scheme—all circle the same question: how do coworking spaces function as civic infrastructure when they’re categorised as commercial real estate?

Some boroughs are getting it. Waltham Forest, Islington, Lewisham—they’ve made the connection between supporting coworking spaces and building community whilst keeping revenue local.

They understand that a thriving microbusiness sector needs infrastructure, and coworking provides that infrastructure in ways traditional business support services can’t.

But Redbridge? Highest concentration of microbusinesses in London, multiple consultancy reports explaining why coworking infrastructure matters, and still scratching their heads about whether it’s worth investing in.

The frustration for operators is real. You’re doing the work—building ecosystems, supporting local economies, creating pathways for people who’d otherwise be isolated in their homes. But you’re invisible to the people allocating resources to community development because you don’t fit the category they’re looking for.

The AI Crossroads and Human Connection

Tilley sees this moment—with AI reshaping how we think about work—as a genuine crossroads.

Not because AI is inherently good or bad, but because it’s forcing everyone to confront what the human role is in daily life. What happens when the tasks we used to do get automated? What becomes valuable when information access is infinite?

This is where coworking spaces become essential rather than optional. Because what can’t be automated is the face-to-face human connection, the intuitive understanding that happens when you’re physically present with someone, the magic of being in a room with people who share a mission and actually listen to each other.

Bernie felt this at his first coworking event—that intangible quality of real space bringing real people together to stretch imaginations about what’s possible. Koffie’s influenced how they think about AI, not as a gadget but as something with profound implications for the workforce, creativity, local economies, and how society functions.

This isn’t nostalgic resistance to technology. It’s recognising that as more work becomes virtual and AI-assisted, the need for physical gathering spaces with genuine human connection becomes more critical, not less.

Coworking spaces are templates for navigating this shift. They’re where technology meets place meets community. Where micro-businesses figure out how to use AI tools whilst maintaining human-scale operations. Where people isolated by remote work reconnect with others doing similar things in their neighbourhood.

The tragedy is that this is happening at precisely the moment when office space is supposedly struggling, when commentators are declaring coworking dead.

What they’re missing is that the thriving coworking spaces aren’t competing with WeWork—they’re replacing the community infrastructure that has been stripped away, while preparing their neighbourhoods for a fundamentally different relationship with work.

What Teresa Did That Everyone Should Notice

Bernie offers a specific example of ecosystem building done right: Teresa Bockmuehl, Community Manager at Patch High Wycombe.

She didn’t host a “boost your business” event. She didn’t do another networking mixer. She organised “When Should I Let My Child Have a Phone?”—bringing together High Wycombe parents and educators to navigate the challenges facing young people and smartphone technology.

It invited both parents from the local area and members of the coworking space to have a genuine conversation about something that truly matters to them as individuals, not as professionals.

This is ecosystem winning in practice. It’s recognising that coworking members aren’t just businesses—they’re neighbours, parents, community members dealing with the same challenges as everyone else in the area. It’s using the space as genuine community infrastructure rather than just a place to rent desks.

Similar examples exist across London: Faceworks in Lewisham supports newly arrived refugees (often from Afghanistan, Iran, and Ukraine) in building economic pathways through community connections, rather than just wrapping them in blankets.

Urban MBA spending two years building relationships with their local area, trying everything from leaflets to door-knocking to workshops, doing the daily grind that creates social capital.

Arc Club, Town Square, Patch—these are coworking brands deliberately getting into their local areas in ways that recognise they’re not just service providers. They’re neighbours building long-term relationships with the communities they’re part of.

This is what councils should be noticing and supporting. This is civic infrastructure being built by independent operators who recognise that economic resilience and social capital are inextricably linked.

The Golden Share Concept

Tilley introduces a fascinating idea from social finance: the golden share.

Give a golden share to, say, the environment in your company. It means the climate gets a seat at your board table.

When you’re making decisions about how to move forward—with finances, strategy, operations—you have to consider: what would the environment say about this if it were actually here in the room?

It sounds abstract until you apply it to coworking spaces. What if you gave a golden share to your actual neighbourhood? Not your members, not your revenue model—your neighbourhood.

The people who walk past your space every day but never come in. The teenagers are using the street outside. The elderly residents who remember when this building was something else.

What would they say about your decisions? Your pricing? Your membership criteria? Your events? Your accessibility?

This isn’t about guilt or performative inclusion. It’s about genuinely expanding who gets considered when you’re making choices that affect an ecosystem.

Because coworking spaces don’t exist in isolation—they’re part of neighbourhoods, local economies, community ecosystems that were there before you arrived and will be there after you’re gone.

Bernie’s worry about coworking spaces becoming cliques—nice people from nice areas creating thriving communities that exclude the actual neighbourhood—is exactly what the golden share concept challenges.

It forces you to ask uncomfortable questions about who benefits from the ecosystem you’re building and who remains invisible.

Why February Matters: The London Coworking Assembly

Bernie and Tilley are planning something unusual: bringing together 150 coworking community builders for a full-day conversation in London this February.

* No superstar speakers.

* No headline attractions.

* Just talking to each other in small groups all day.

* Because here’s what they’ve learned from the monthly online Unreasonable Connection events: when you give people room to actually talk, without performing for a big audience, conversations go deep fast.

The challenge with most events is that it takes half the time to get your head into gear. You arrive, you’re still thinking about the commute or the emails you left behind, and by the time you’ve settled into being present, the event’s nearly over.

So they’re building thinking time into the run-up. Conversations and preparation before the physical event, so when you arrive in the room, you’re already in flow. Your thought process has started, your questions are forming, and you know why you’re there.

This matters because of what Bernie keeps encountering: coworking operators who think they’re the only people slugging their guts out, trying to build sustainable businesses that make a difference in their local communities. They’re building ecosystems, creating social capital, changing lives—and they feel completely alone.

The London Coworking Assembly is about making the invisible visible. Connecting the hundreds of parallel conversations already happening so people can share resources, swap strategies, and feel part of a movement rather than isolated solo efforts.

It’s an ecosystem winning for ecosystem builders. Which is precisely what this moment in time needs.

Links & Resources

Tilley Harris’s Work

* AKOU: www.akou.co.uk

* Tilley Harris on LinkedIn

Projects & Community

* Join this and other conversations with people in the LinkedIn Coworking Group.

* Unreasonable Connection Monthly online gatherings for Coworking Community Builders.

* FLOC LinkedIn Coworking Recognition Campaign

* Workspace Design Show London 2026

* European Coworking Day May 2026

* London Coworking Assembly

* European Coworking Assembly

Bernie’s Projects

* London Coworking Assembly 5-Day AI Crash Course for Coworking Spaces

* Free email course: 5 Biggest Mistakes Coworking Community Builders Make (And How to Avoid Them)

* Connect with Bernie on LinkedIn

Mentioned in Episode

* Islington Affordable Workplace Scheme

* Faceworks, Lewisham

* Urban MBA, Hackney

* Space4, London

* Patch (Teresa High Wycombe)

* Arc Club

* Town Square

* Walcott Foundation (Lambeth project mentioned)

One More Thing

Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.

Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability—values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.

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