For those of us that already live shared space, it is easy to list the benefits for the residing nonprofits and their communities. For those pursuing the concept, you may still be in the process of shopping the idea around and convincing local funders about the variety of benefits: opportunities to increase collaboration, access to quality office and meeting space and basic shared services, a one-stop shop for services, advocacy, and/or community gatherings, and more. NCN was fortunate to have representatives from three foundations that “get it” as panelists on our most recent webinar, “Can Foundations Lead the Social Purpose Real Estate Movement?” All three foundations championed shared space in their community as an efficient and effective way to support nonprofits, human service organizations, small businesses, and ultimately, their community.

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing our understanding of the workplace. As nonprofit centers and their tenant organizations prepare to reopen for in-person operations, there will be many new health and safety protocols to implement. There may also be opportunities for workers to continue virtual work arrangements or flexible scheduling, reducing workspace density. These strategies have potential to vastly impact nonprofit center and tenant facilities, operations, workspaces, and cultures now and in the long-term. This is a very complex situation to plan for but as advisors to organizations considering new workplace strategies, we suggest that the place to start is to proactively seek feedback from staff to better understand, from their point of view, what will be needed to support a workplace that is safe, healthy, comfortable, and productive.

Our friends at the Northern California Grantmakers (NCG) recently published a report on COVID19 impacts on nonprofit real estate. The report is a part of NCG’s effort to understand and address nonprofit displacement in the San Francisco Bay Area and was done in partnership with Harder+Company Community Research. The Bay Area’s pandemic shelter-in-place order, issued almost exactly one year ago, was one of the first issued as well as the most stringent in the country. This makes the pandemic’s economic consequences on Bay Area nonprofits and their ability to sustain mission-enhancing workspaces particularly compelling.

For those of us running a nonprofit center, the myriad daily decisions -- troubleshooting HVAC issues, managing tenant improvement projects, determining where to store all that hand sanitizer -- can seemingly occupy our whole brains. It’s easy to forget that we’re part of a movement: a movement of social purpose real estate. Social purpose real estate, or SPRE, is broadly defined as spaces that serve the common good such as public parks, affordable housing, libraries, museums, and, of course, community-serving workspaces, i.e., nonprofit centers. At NCN we’ve recently been refocusing ourselves on this movement.