Coworking Office
Elevate your WFH Experience
The Coworking Office is designed as an independent and collaborative working space. By providing this fully equipped workspace, we hope to help residents find a dependable space to enhance productivity.
Decorated by the mural art of our youth visual artists, Tabi Sadikin & Amy Tran — the space includes four individual workstations that double as both a desk and a whiteboard, an additional workspace that consists of a monitor + iMac, a large mounted dry-erase board and more.
The growing flexible office space market can benefit communities like Jane-Finch. Our priority is managing a space that can be the source for our residents to create jobs for themselves and one another.
What can the room be used for?
Private room with natural lighting
Independent or collaborative working (up to 4 people)
Virtual calls or phone call meetings
Post-Production Editing (Photo/Video)
Music Production (Recording equipment coming soon)
Painting / Visual Arts (please contact first)
The Problem
"Working From Home (WFH) is not an option for everyone in Northwest Toronto’s Low-Income Neighbourhoods.
But now, it can be.
Co-working spaces are assets to a neighbourhood; however, with creative space closed and residents experiencing the consequences of Toronto's affordable housing crisis, Jane-Finch residents have minimal access to spaces away from home to work.
Why create this space?
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The reality is when one lives in government housing with their whole families, often shares rooms, and may not have access to basic amenities like a desk or high-speed internet, it puts our residents and youth at a disadvantage.
Many young people cannot participate in work properly, are doing interviews from their beds and cannot travel or afford a separate co-working space.
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With room rentals averaging $30-$50 an hour or monthly memberships starting at an average of $150, the minimum wage jobs our residents may currently make it hard to justify paying for workspace in exchange for a minimum of 2 hours of their work elsewhere. New start-ups and students may need more funds to begin paying these fees.
Toronto's thriving co-working industry provides office spaces, shared workspaces and dedicated hot desks for individuals and teams to work away from home in a shared office setting. It reduces the rental and maintenance costs of one business wanting to rent a private office by offering these different membership models based on flexible contracts. Many of these spaces also allow students, business professionals, and others to book meeting rooms or one-day passes at the several independently operated locations found across the city.
However, membership models make the space exclusive to those who can afford an average of $30 a day working away from home or $30-$50 an hour to rent a private meeting room. Monthly memberships can start at $150. With many of our residents working minimum-wage jobs, the option to work in a coworking space away from their homes would cost them a minimum of two hours of their work as well.
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The nearest co-working spaces to the York University Heights area are at least a 20-minute drive or a 45-60-minute commute by transit. As a result, new work styles are in demand, with flexible real estate operators occupying 3.1 million square feet of office space with 2.3 million square feet existing in downtown Toronto.
With the Finch West LRT development already impeding the commutes of many local residents, it is not realistic for them to spend an average of 1-2 hours a day to work elsewhere.
