Team Collab: Team Review
Barriers & Enablers
From a team perspective, the largest barrier that we had to overcome was making sure that everyone’s ideas were fairly represented and integrated into the final product. Inherent in any team activity is the need to collaborate, cooperate, and find common ground to build upon -- the three core values that became the vehicles of our resilience.
The two largest obstacles we faced over the tenure of developing “Collab” was the notion that our project, then “SheWorks”, was gender-exclusive and classist. We had originally branded “SheWorks” as an all-female coworking space meant to provide new mothers with the physical (i.e. breast-pumping stations, childcare center) and emotional (i.e. network of new mothers) capital they needed to get back in the workforce. Although “SheWorks” was a valiant effort to achieve gender equality, we realized that it not only reinforced heteronormativity and was thus exclusive of people across the gender spectrum, but also disproportionately put the burden of parenthood and childcare on the shoulders of women yet again, perpetuating the toxic mindset that women had to “do-it all.”
Thus, after participating in Swarthmore’s inaugural “Design Thinking” course this past fall, we had an emergency meeting where we bounced ideas, concerns, and solutions off of each other until the birth of our project today: Collab. Collab is built on the principles that the only way we can truly achieve gender equality is if individuals across the entire gender spectrum collaborate. Open to any and all who identify as new parents, Collab firmly believes that the responsibility of parenthood and childcare should be shared.
Although our pivot from “SheWorks” to “Collab” was more gender-inclusive and aligned better with our original goal of tackling gender inequality, we were still tasked with the issue of deconstructing classism. Coworking spaces are inherently classist because they presuppose jobs that have remote or freelance aspects, simply put because the people who inhabit coworking spaces typically access their work from a laptop. Moreover, the membership fees typically associated with coworking spaces tend to be a hefty sum, which immediately eliminates those who simply cannot afford to work in a coworking space. With these concerns in mind, we reconvened as a team and ideated possible ways to solve this problem.
Our first solution was to pilot a Collab-specific nanny hiring process, where we would hire nannies for the space based off of potential as opposed to prior education, experience, or socioeconomic status. We would then issue our own nanny certification tests and licenses. However, we quickly came to realize that the childcare industry is heavily regulated, making the integration of an innovative nanny hiring process that much more complex. This was not to mention that our “coworking-meets-childcare” service was built on levels of trust between us and members, as members are essentially trusting us with the most important aspects of their lives -- their children. Thus, we concluded that we would most certainly undermine that trust by pursuing a self-regulated nanny hiring process.
Thus, we regrouped and ideated and innovated again, this time focusing on how Collab could engage the greater community area in an effort to deconstruct classism. We eventually came up with the “Collab Forum.” The Collab Forum is basically where Facebook meets LinkedIn. Collab members can post about part-time work, freelance projects etc. that they need help with, and general community members can respond to job postings. If the work is remote, they can be finished accordingly, and if the work needs to be done in person, general community members can determine how accessible the location is through location technology integrated into the Forum which indicates whether the office is within a 5, 10, 15 etc., mile radius. Membership to the Forum is not exclusive and available after a short application that will be found on the Collab website. The goal of the Collab Forum is to create a community of mentorship, which is key to professional success, between Collab members and general community members -- all equally committed to social mobility in their communities. However, the Collab Forum is currently not a part of our Business Model. We hope to use future events, like the 2017 Harvard Social Enterprise conference in March, to refine future aspects of Collab like the Collab Forum.
The last barrier that we had to overcome was ultimately one of realism. We had the honor of being nominated as one of two Swarthmore teams to compete in the 2016 United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) College Pitch Philly conference, where we talked to potential investors, mentors, and other competitors about our idea. One recurring concern we encountered was how sustainable launching a physical coworking space was -- especially given that the founders of such a space would likely concurrently be in undergraduate or graduate schooling. After deliberating over this concern for hours after the conference, we came up with one last adjustment that brings Collab to the project it is today.
We essentially pivoted from launching a physical “Collab” coworking space to advising other companies to adopt the “Collab Model” in order to help close existing gaps in gender and workforce inequity. We essentially rebranded Collab to be a social impact advisory firm as opposed to the coworking space itself, because we truly believed that this would be the most sustainable pathway to long-term change, and this would be the definitive way to maximize the number of people we affect, and lives we change.
All of these barriers were only overcome once we, as a team, collaborated, cooperated, and built off of each other’s ideas. Our ability to work together
quickly became our greatest strength, and it is the reason why Collab is what it is today.
