EARLY ROOTS
In 1998, eager to ‘shake things up’, a small group of UK students organised a 2-day conference on human rights, environmental, and social issues featuring some of the most prominent world leaders and thinkers, including The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, English journalist and TV presenter Jon Snow and several Nobel Peace Laureates.
It led to a flood of interest from other organisations, including the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development, who asked the group to replicate the London event for their 2002 summit in Johannesburg. However, the students quickly realised that the convention centre assigned to them was not appropriate for their event.
Instead, they ventured into Soweto, where they met anti-Apartheid activists who were now facing the challenge of dealing with a huge mountain of waste accumulating in the centre of their neighbourhood.
By the time the UN Summit took place in 2002, the student team and community members had turned the mountain of waste into a thriving, fully functioning area. Soweto’s ‘Mountain of Hope’ became an icon for local community regeneration and sustainable development, and many world leaders, so much so that it became that it became the focus of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s speech.
TAKING SHAPE
Upon returning to the UK, the students realised that, as in Soweto, people in the UK wanted to make a difference through their work, yet they were generally operating out of their homes, in isolation.
“What if these people could come together in the same physical space and have a place to connect?”
Robinson, with the other students, would answer that very question in 2005 by creating The Hub, the first workspace solely dedicated to social innovation. Built on a shoestring budget, the 300-square-meter space opened on the top floor of a warehouse space in Islington, facilitating ways to work, meet, learn, and connect.
FROM SPACE TO IMPACT
More than a decade on, the Impact Hubs have become much more than simply places to work, with the current model shifting its focus from space at the centre of its model to space as an enabler of impact. The global Impact Hub network is now, more than ever before, focused on supporting their membership base of entrepreneurs, freelancers, and change makers, who are working at the edges of traditional work environments and business culture, to make the impact they wish to see at local and global levels, whether they tap into the network in the physical or virtual environments.
We look forward to the future.