Giving Compass' Take:

• CultureHouse is a small pop-up coffee shop in Cambridge, MA, that creates more community engagement and development opportunities within the neighborhood. 

• How can donors help expand community-based projects such as this one? Do you have access to spaces like CultureHouse in your area? 

• Here are nine ways nonprofits can increase community engagement. 

From the outside, a small pop-up space in a storefront in Cambridge, Massachusetts, looks like it might be a coffee shop. Called CultureHouse, it does, in fact, serve coffee, but it’s free. The pop-up is designed as a community hub that anyone can use to work, meet friends, or watch live music or movies at night without paying.

It’s designed as a way to bring new social infrastructure to neighborhoods and a way to activate vacant storefronts. Until CultureHouse moved into the building in July 2019, the store had been vacant for a year and a half. “We describe ourselves as an indoor public park or a community living room,” says CultureHouse director Aaron Greiner.

As a college student studying abroad in Copenhagen a few years ago, Greiner noticed that the city had indoor public spaces of a type that didn’t really exist in the U.S. One coffee-shop-slash-bar, for example, aimed at students, sold drinks but didn’t require anyone to spend money to use the space.

“Once I got back to the U.S., I really started to realize how we don’t really have many places like that, that don’t have a financial barrier to entry,” he says. He also noticed the growing prevalence of vacant retail stores in Boston; the greater Boston area now has a retail vacancy rate of around 10%.

In 2018, after a year of planning, CultureHouse opened its first pop-up for a month as a test to see if the concept would work. It was successful enough that Greiner decided to continue the work, partnering next with a property owner that owned storefront space at the bottom of a large office building in Kendall Square.

Read the full article about Culture House by Adele Peters at Fast Company.