Go Young, Go Local, Go Morality

3 Rules For Rebuilding Social Capital in your neighbourhood in 2026

So Reader,

Next month, I'm packing my bags for a stretch in London and Poole.

I'm going to three events. Three rooms entirely focused on how we actually build neighbourhood infrastructure, rather than just talking about it on the internet.

On Tuesday the 12th, I'm at the FlexSA Conference running a panel called "Beyond the Desk." We're looking at how flexible workspaces embed themselves in local communities. How a coworking space actually functions as part of its neighbourhood.

Mid-week, I'm heading down to Poole for Creator Day with Mark Masters and YATM.The entire theme this year is community. Jon Alexander is speaking.

On Wednesday I’ll be working out of FOUNDRY coworking space at the Cowork Crew event. And the brilliant thing is, the FOUNDRY folks are coming up to London to attend our London Coworking Assembly event again the following week.

That event is on the 19th of May at Space4. Unreasonable Connection Live!

We are getting the people who run projects in coworking spaces, space owners, community managers, and folks from local authorities into one room.

It's a work day about the practical application of everything I write about in this newsletter, at street level. Sharing what works, what fails, and how to actually make things happen. From 09:30 to 15:30 we’ll be working in small groups facilitated by Tilley and AKOU.

I know exactly what happens when you get the right people in a room together. I learned it fifteen years ago.

Humans of London

About fifteen years ago, I was based in my mate's office in Clerkenwell. It had an event space.

Andrea - community manager at Meetup - got in touch because we ran the London Meetup Organisers Group. She asked if we could do something while Scott Heiferman was in town. We emailed people.

One hundred and fifty showed up.

The local cafe we went to every day did the food. Hot homemade pasta. Scott interviewed a few of the organisers, but we went around the room and every single person said their name and what their meet-up was about.

That took about an hour.

I was in the business-network-creative-tech corner of the internet. Everyone else in that room was using Meetup the way they needed to - every nationality, every interest, every instrument, every political group, every food, every skill someone needed to learn, every need someone needed to fulfil, every type of person looking for their people.

I was in tears by the end, it was 'humans of London' at 100 miles an hour, people from walks of life I never would have had a conversation with if it had not been for that event, their avatars had come to life.

People kept asking me afterwards: how did you 'get' Scott Heiferman?

We got lucky. We happened to have an event space. The cafe down the road could make food and the combination clicked instantly when Andrea emailed.

People already knew the building as my private clubhouse in Clerkenwell, even though it was me on a spare desk in the corner of a spare room and a hundred people worked for the company there. I got people through the door to networking breakfasts and events every week. That's the only reason it worked.

What Citizens ruined for me

That room is what I think of when I talk about citizens, it was an indication of what is possible when we thought beyond 'beers and pizza' events.

When the Citizens book came along it ruined me for polite conversation.

Now people are showing the ACTionism documentary in their coworking spaces. Conversations are starting in neighbourhoods that wouldn't have started otherwise.

So when Manuel Conti invited me to do a short LinkedIn video about books that matter, I chose Citizens. My two lifelong books are Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Orwell's 1984 - they've always been with me. But Manuel's question was about right now, at street level, so Primo and George had to step aside.

I'm looking for it now, so a few months ago when Mia Amor Mottley - Prime Minister of Barbados - appeared on Trevor Noah's podcast I tuned in. The way Mia elegantly discusses colonialism, climate, immigration, and the power of small nations is a lesson in itself.

The next video that came up was Robert Putnam.

I'd read Bowling Alone years ago. I remembered the feeling of it more than the argument - the sense that we'd been losing something and couldn't quite name what. Putnam on Trevor Noah with Christiana was a super interesting and timely refresher.

Towards the end, Trevor and Christiana asked Bob for their homework. He said he'd keep it simple. Three rules for rebuilding social capital.

The three rules, on the ground

Go young.

The coworking and real estate industries are full of old white men stuck in their ways.

Kofi Oppong has been saying for years - ten, actually: there won't be jobs in employability as we know it. The people furthest from the technology get hit the hardest. The young people Urban MBA work with in East London communities are being pushed into independent work - freelance, contract, self-employed - before they have the infrastructure to survive it.

Urban MBA closes that gap one cohort at a time, by word of mouth, the next group referred in by the last group.

If I'd had access to Urban MBA in my late teens and early twenties, I would have thrived.

Urban MBA is ten years old this month. Kofi was at Downing Street two weeks ago. His article marking the decade starts with this:

"We began with a mission of no young person lost or left aside. Our mission today: to create a world where no one is lost or left aside."

FLOC - Future Leaders of Coworking - is building the professional infrastructure that the industry has never bothered to create. Sam, DeShawn, and Caroline. When Sam was in London last year, I made sure she got to visit Urban MBA. They're both building what the industry won't - they needed to be in the same room.

When I worked in hospitality, there was nothing like FLOC.

Working in a bar is different to working in a coworking space, but the minute a coffee gets knocked over a member's laptop and you're the one who has to de-escalate the panic, clean the desk, and figure out if comping their day pass is enough to save the relationship - you know exactly what I mean.

The invisible labour. The late hours. The emotional weight of being responsible for a room full of people.

Everyone talks about how many billions the coworking industry will be worth in the next ten minutes. A lot of that relies on young people doing invisible work for not very much money.

Which is why FLOC matters.

Go local.

95.3% of UK private sector businesses are micro-businesses or sole traders. 5.4 million of us.

The freelancer grinding at their kitchen table doesn't need a global platform. They need a neighbourhood.

The modern real estate model operates on an arithmetic of extraction. When a venture-backed corporate flex-space opens a massive glass box in a city centre, they install an extraction pump.

You pay your membership, and that money is immediately wired out of your postcode to inflate a portfolio valuation for distant shareholders.

Independent spaces do the exact opposite.

Research from the New Economics Foundation shows that every pound spent with a local business circulates four times in the local economy. The money goes around.

A member buys lunch from the independent cafe next door, hires the local accountant sitting opposite them, and collaborates on a project for the local council. That is the mathematical definition of social capital. It is what keeps local economies from collapsing when the national economy falters.

In early 2002, just after 9/11 in New York City, Scott Heiferman and his co-founders launched Meetup with a very specific instruction.

Use the internet to get off the internet.

They didn't want to build a digital universe. They wanted to rebuild in-person, local gatherings when a city was grieving and fractured. As Indy Johar says, the neighbourhood is a site of freedom.

You cannot single-handedly fix the global macroeconomic weather when it turns hostile. But the neighbourhood is the exact human scale where you still possess the agency to build resilient infrastructure.

We are micro-businesses holding the roof up for other micro-businesses. That's not a niche. That's the majority.

Go morality.

Ellie Meredith was 16 when she went to her teachers worried about climate collapse. They told her to eat porridge and get an early night.

She emailed Jon Alexander. Two years later she was running around Europe making a documentary that would be shown all over the world, called ACTionism.

I interviewed Ellie on the Coworking Values Podcast.

Ellie said: "I really struggled to relate to people at school because the conversations I was hoping to have with my friends were about the things going on outside the school gates."

She wasn't just anxious. She was looking for people willing to look at the same things she was looking at.

"I was looking for people. I was feeling quite lost at sea. What I love about finding the Re-Action Collective is that it's permitted me to imagine another way of doing things. I've got a crew by my side."

Right now, spaces across the UK are booking ACTionism screening for European Coworking Day on May 6th.

Because these aren't just film nights. There's a circle method. Dreaming activities. Repair workshops. Post-it notes. The film is the invitation. What happens after is the point.

I first read Peter Block's book Community: The Structure of Belonging in 2014. There's a whole section about how to arrange a room in a circle when the neighbourhood gathers.

I remember reading it and having absolutely no idea how I would get my neighbourhood to gather. What would they gather for? What could I possibly put on that people would actually show up to?

It took me ten years to find the thing where I could get my neighbourhood to gather around one collective conversation. Now, I would gather them for an ACTionism screening. Anxiety, held collectively, turns into action.

Since then, Peter Block has become a regular on the Coworking Values Podcast. Whenever we talk about coworking, he's looking at it from outside the industry, bringing extensive experience of local community building.

We advocate for each other's work because we are looking at the exact same problem.

Peter told me: "Your coworking spaces, the way you do them, are designed for liberation, not for productivity. Liberation meaning: I came here to create something with other people, even if we never talked about it."

After all those conversations, I'd never heard it put that way before.

The corporate consumer story optimizes for productivity—renting a desk to maximize individual output. But local, independent spaces are designed to free people from profound isolation.

When Robert Putnam talks about "go morality," he looks back over 125 years of history. He says the leading indicator for fixing economic inequality is simple: people actually thinking they have obligations to other people.

A "We" phenomenon, not an "I" phenomenon.

If you want to see what that looks like when you combine all three of Putnam's rules—young people, acting locally, taking on obligations—look at Chris and Elise from the Urban MBA Youth Board.

They aren't just using their tech education to get high-paying corporate jobs and leave East London behind. They recently sat down directly with the London Transport Police, collaborating to build cybersecurity courses designed specifically to protect their local community.

That is the exact definition of an obligation to others.

At the end of Putnam’s interview, Trevor Noah notes that this kind of work is like eating healthy: "Eat the vegetables and don't eat things that come in packets."

Trevor says people resist it because it's too simple. They tell him, "Yeah, yeah, but I need something more complicated than that."

People want an app, a B2B growth hack, or a polished five-step strategy to save the high street.

But you know what it actually takes.

It's the invisible labour. It's Chris and Elise protecting their neighbours. It's Peter Block's liberation. It's Ellie finding her crew. It’s treating the people who walk through your door as citizens instead of consumers.

It’s simple, it’s hard, and it’s the only thing that works.

Come join us at Space4 on the May 19th 09:30 - 15:30

Bernie's picks

🎟️ FlexSA Conference - May 12th

🎟️ Creator Day Poole - May 14th/15th (Catch Jon Alexander speaking)

🎟️ Unreasonable Connection - May 19th (Join Tilley, AKOU, and the LCA at Space4)

🎙️ Trevor Noah with Robert Putnam (The "Three Rules" homework)

🎙️ Building the Next Generation of Coworking - Sam Shea on the Coworking Values Podcast

🎙️ ACTionism and Community Screenings - Ellie Meredith on the Coworking Values Podcast

🎙️ Why Connectors Create the Future - Peter Block on the Coworking Values Podcast

📚Kofi and Urban MBA - 10 × 10: From the streets of East London to the door of Number 10.

✅ You can book a desk, meeting room or the podcast studio at Urban MBA here.