Part One: The One Where We Flocked Together.
414 E. 8th street is Commongrounds Coop’s first project. A four-story mixed-use building in Traverse City Michigan, hosting a variety of nonprofit, business, and residential tenants; visual arts programming; and events and activities—all at the intersection of wellness, arts, family, and food. We wanted this space to be unique, top to tail.
The Egg
It all started with an idea sketched out on a napkin while sharing coffee with a colleague. Is this still how the majority of great ideas and business ventures still happen?
The idea was simple (so we thought) – inspired by project founder Chris Treater’s original vision of the evolution of his coffee brand Higher Grounds, paired with Kate Redman’s strategy of building said vision combined wither her successful coworking endeavor Commonplace – all as a cooperative real estate project seemed straightforward (pause for laughter) – and here we are in 2023, this is Commongrounds.
Essentially a real estate cooperative rooted in what Kate described as the “adjacent possible;” a place designed for the coming together of connections and community. The big challenge of the project is actually what hooked me: how do we educate the community and teach them how to invest in “Main Street (aka their own town) rather than “Wall Street.” With my experiential design background, love of digital storytelling and eye for unique, out-of-the box projects – I rose to this community building challenge, and joined a team that was composed of non-traditional development folks and other passionate community members – of course, who also all believed in this idea.
Invest in the Nest
To make telling the story of investments and cooperatives easier to bite off, we wrapped it in a clever bird pun. The cooperative became the coop, Early-bird community members were “caw’d” to action…with a series of different bird levels with which to identify. Welcome to the coop! The path to flight wasn’t the easiest, afterall we had to find a “fun” yet informative way to educate about investment, bottom line returns, co-operatives, and how being financed by the community is extremely beneficial. Don’t get me wrong the birds helped, but we knew we needed to be smart and create events where we could also socially listen to our potential nesters. Everybody has a dream right? So we leaned in and hosted a series of flock parties. We invited people in, we had educational pieces ready, and to top it all off we had really trendy mugs. Proving once and for all that shared ownership is cool.
We rallied, no wait flocked, together to start raising capital on pure vision. More and more people began to come forward inspired, and ready to contribute their piece of the puzzle. Although we weren’t quite ready to leave the nest just yet, the next chapter entailed running a parallel endeavor of designing this four-story, cross-functional community on 8th street. Did we mention we still needed to get through 2020? Stay tuned!