The Amp, a coworking space in Downtown Vancouver, was launched in 2014 as a social enterprise by Ecotrust Canada. What started as a solution to a need for affordable office space, has grown into a thriving community of mission driven organizations creating impact across Canada.
Over the last 10 years, not only have residential rental rates increased in Vancouver, but so have commercial and office spaces. During the last 5 years The Amp has provided an affordable home for over 20 different organizations and more than 100 individuals from a wide range of organizations, each creating impactful work socially or environmentally. Members are supported daily by the Coworking Community Manager to help develop inter-member collaborations, build relationships and help with day to day tasks.
Coworking with co-workers
Two words with important differences (other than just the hyphen). Co-workers have the same employer, while coworkers work in the same location. Having both at The Amp is advantageous as individuals can get support from their colleagues (co-workers) and also benefit from shared knowledge and resources from within the community of different organizations sharing the work space (coworkers). An example of this was seen over the summer when two of our members Light House Sustainable Building Centre and Catalyst Community Developments Society were able to share an intern. This provided the student with a broader range of work experience from different industries, and the organizations could share the cost and time between them.
RevAmp-ing office culture
Collaboration within organizations can be difficult, luckily The Amp’s Coworking Community Manager seeks to tackle this task by facilitating the networking process through hosting weekly Huddles to exchange news about projects and achievements, regular lunch & learns and of course – monthly pub nights!
Coworking spaces contain a mix of different work cultures and individual personalities that may not naturally mix outside of the space. We like to approach this as though conducting a cacophony of sounds into harmonic symphony that enables each unique organization to feed into a thriving coworking community.
Book a desk and join the community!
The Amp’s members are an inspirational community of change makers, and we are always on the look-out to welcome similarly driven organizations into our space. In the last year:
- Spring have raised over $18 million for early stage impact businesses and launched Cohort 2 of their Impact Startup Visa (ISV) with 5 entrepreneurs who have moved to Vancouver.
- Catalyst Community Developments completed their award winning project Madrona which provided 49 affordable housing units at 30% of Housing Income Limits.
- Affordable housing developer, New Market Funds have invested in 49 units of affordable housing in Victoria, BC and have committed to invest in another 358 units in Vancouver.
- Fellow member Light House celebrated the first-year anniversary of their circular economy program NISP and has contributed to helping notable green building projects achieve certification.
Interested to find out more? Feel free to drop by in-person, check out theampvancouver.ca or contact the Amp Coworking Community Manager at info@theamp.space for availability, rates and benefits.