Sarah Woolsey wanted to improve the community. It started out as simple as where her family shopped— shifting to spend their money at locally owned businesses as much as possible. Then Woolsey, who comes from a family of entrepreneurs and is driven by her religious faith, began thinking bigger, about ways she could bring together like-minded people who shared a desire to participate in community building. The result was an entrepreneurial venture into coworking.
Woolsey transformed the former Beacon Lumber Company building (featuring an iconic three-story lighthouse) in Beacon Hill into Impact Guild, a coworking space designed for mission-oriented entrepreneurs, through which Woolsey believed she could help support and shape a network of creative changemakers.
Beyond providing a traditional coworking space to its members, Impact Guild puts on events and classes at the intersection of entrepreneurship and philanthropy. For example, Impact Guild offers a Make Good Fellowship, a six-month program to aid the work of social entrepreneurs working with churches and other organizations.
When Woolsey and her team started planning Impact Guild almost six years ago, they also founded Mission City Renewal, a nonprofit community development incubator, which acts as a bridge to help entrepreneurs implement their best ideas to benefit the city. When Honest Soul Yoga, which has offices in the Impact Guild, wanted to use yoga to assist a veterans’ organization in town, Mission City Renewal helped by hosting classes before donating all of the proceeds to the group
“[Mission City Renewal] was started with the idea of ‘When we start to gather these creative, mission-minded entrepreneurs through the Impact Guild, new ideas are going to come up. How great would it be to have an organization to help develop those new ideas and launch other programs,” Woolsey says. Another recently launched program aims to help churches find ways to use their properties in ways that aid the community.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot about how the physical space at Impact Guild operates. There are more dedicated desks and temporary walls that allow everyone to maintain safe distances from one another, as well as new air purification units. But Woolsey says the pandemic only strengthened Impact Guild’s sense of purpose.
“We’ve always said, it’s not just about a building; it’s not just about a space. It’s first and foremost about relationships and the connectivity between people.” Woolsey says. “COVID provided us an opportunity to be much more creative about what that would mean.”
Two More Coworking Space
Geekdom
A tech-focused coworking operation in the historic Rand Building with the motto “building San Antonio one startup at a time.” Geekdom helps startup founders by providing mentor- ship, connections to business and tech leaders, pre-seed funding opportunities and more.
Launch SA
Located inside the Central Library, this entrepreneurship and small business center opened as a partnership between the City of San Antonio and LiftFund in 2014. Launch SA focuses on connecting entrepreneurs with over 200 business owner mentors in a wide variety of industries. The idea is that these local connections can help young businesses grow and flourish.
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June 01, 2021 at 11:23AM
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Impact Guild Brings a Nonprofit Backbone to Coworking - San Antonio Magazine
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